Vertep: the travelling puppet nativity

The vertep is a portable puppet theatre carried at Christmas, and its design tells you the whole of what it was for.

The box

Two storeys, like a small house. Puppets are worked from below through slots in the floors, and the performer speaks all the parts.

The upper level is the nativity: the stable, the shepherds, the magi, Herod and the angel. It is performed straight, in a formal register, with carols.

The lower level is everything else, and it is where the audience actually laughs. Local characters, a soldier, a priest, a Cossack, a landlord, a devil, and jokes about whoever in the village had a difficult year. The satire was topical and could be sharp.

Why the two levels

Because the arrangement lets both exist without either damaging the other. Sacred content stays sacred by staying upstairs; comedy stays comedy by staying downstairs. The physical structure of the box enforces a separation that would otherwise be a matter of tact.

It is an elegant solution to a problem every religious drama tradition has had.

Who performed it

Students, seminarians and travelling groups, going house to house through the Christmas season and paid in food, drink and coins.

The revival

Vertep has come back strongly, performed by theatre groups, schools and church communities, and there are now both faithful reconstructions and modern versions using the form for contemporary satire — which is, of course, what the lower level was always for.

A two-storey box carrying the sacred above and the worldly below is striking as design: one object meets two different audience expectations at the same time. In industry we would call that modularity. I am not the person to assess what was performed or how; but the box itself is a well-conceived device.