The House by the Stable - A Christmas Play

Man keeps a comfortable house, a mistress called Pride and a friend named Hell. Then Joseph and Mary ask for room in his stable, and he has a single night in which to choose. Charles Williams (1886-1945) wrote The House by the Stable in the autumn of 1939 for Ruth Spalding's Oxford company, and once it had been staged the players took it into halls, garages, schools and air-raid shelters. It asks for six actors and almost nothing else. Pride and her brother Hell mean to have the jewel that Man carries about him and values so lightly, which is of course his soul; Gabriel comes to the door in disguise; the travellers outside want only somewhere to sleep. The old pattern of virtue, vice and a bargaining human being is set down beside the manger, in verse plain enough to be spoken by amateurs and sharp enough to land. Williams was one of the Inklings, the Oxford circle that met around C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, and is better known now for supernatural novels such as Descent into Hell and All Hallows' Eve. Of his plays this is the most approachable, and he returned to its characters two years later in a sequel, Grab and Grace (1941); both were collected in Seed of Adam and Other Plays in 1948.