Nanny Piggins and the Runaway Lion

by R. A. Spratt

  “What I don’t understand is that if they are so talentless at acting, why didn’t they bring a cannon?” asked Nanny Piggins. “Then at least they could finish with a bang.”

  Finally it was Mr. Green’s turn. He walked up onstage and stood in front of the assembled crowd. Nanny Piggins, Boris, and the children held their breath in anticipation, wondering just how bad Mr. Green would be. Or perhaps he would surprise them and actually be good?

  They soon found out as Mr. Green started to recite, “To be, or not to be…”

  Nanny Piggins, Boris, and the children instantly burst out laughing. Mr. Green was even more awful than they had expected. There was something about the way his jowls quivered and his top lip sweated when he was trying to sound impressive that really was very funny.

  “… That is the question. Whether it is…” continued Mr. Green.

  “Make him stop!” called Boris. Not to be mean, but for health reasons, because he was laughing so hard he thought he was going to crack a rib.

  Mr. Green did not notice. He was so absorbed in trying to sound important, he would not have noticed if a steamroller had driven through the theater. But Mrs. Fortescue-Brown was more observant. She shot to her feet, turned around, and proceeded to scold Nanny Piggins and the children. (Boris quickly hid behind a plaster replica statue of the Venus de Milo.)

  “Look here,” said Mrs. Fortescue-Brown. “It’s not as easy as it looks, saying all those lines. If you’re so smart, why don’t you come down here and give it a try?”

  Nanny Piggins hopped out of her seat.

  “All right, I will,” she said. She ran down to the front of the theater and leaped onto the stage. Mr. Green dropped his copy of the play and hurried away. He did not want to be known to have a working relationship with a pig. Nanny Piggins scooped up the text and found the right page.

  “When you’re ready,” said Mrs. Fortescue-Brown.

  “I’m always ready,” said Nanny Piggins.

  “Then begin,” said Mrs. Fortescue-Brown.

  Nanny Piggins did not need to be told twice. She immediately launched into Hamlet’s famous speech.

  Now reader, this is a hard part for me as an author, because this is where I have to describe Nanny Piggins’s performance. And how do you describe perfection? Suffice it to say that never before, in the four hundred years since Hamlet was written, have those words been spoken so beautifully. Being such a gifted performer, Nanny Piggins instantly had the whole audience enthralled—she made them think, she made them laugh, she made them cry, she made them want to call their mothers as soon as they got home—so that when Nanny Piggins uttered the last syllable, everyone in the theater (except Mr. Green) leaped to their feet and burst into applause.

  “That was brilliant, breathtaking, awesome!” gushed Mrs. Fortescue-Brown as she pumped Nanny Piggins’s trotter up and down and slapped her on the back.

  “I know,” said Nanny Piggins truthfully.

  “You have to accept the lead role,” said Mrs. Fortescue-Brown. “We need you to play Hamlet.”

  “What?!” exploded Mr. Green. “But she’s a woman!”

  “So?” said Mrs. Fortescue-Brown. “Men played women all the time in Shakespeare’s day.”

  “And she’s a… she’s a…” (Mr. Green found it hard to say the following words.) “She’s a pig!” he hissed.

  “The play is called ‘Ham-let,’ ” said Nanny Piggins. “I assumed it was about a pig. It’s not called Man-let, is it?”

  “Good point,” said Mrs. Fortescue-Brown, turning to her assistant. “Make a note to mention that in all the publicity.”

  So Nanny Piggins, the children, and Mr. Green returned home. Mr. Green sulked the whole way because he had only been given the part of second tree from the left (and first tree from the left was being played by a sheet of cardboard).

  As soon as they got home, Mr. Green locked himself in his study so he could work on the portrayal of his character. He had a lot of important creative decisions to make—oak or cedar? Evergreen or deciduous? It would take hours.

  Meanwhile Nanny Piggins went into the living room and found a comfortable seat so she could begin reading Hamlet.

  Before we go on, I should explain something—Nanny Piggins had worked in the circus for many years, where she had performed in five shows a night, seven nights a week. As a result, she never had the opportunity to attend the theater herself, which meant she had never seen any of Shakespeare’s plays. Obviously she knew parts of Hamlet’s famous soliloquies from watching television, because her favorite character, Bethany on The Young and the Irritable, had once stolen the identity of an English professor. But when Nanny Piggins began reading Hamlet, she was utterly shocked.

  “But this play is not written in English!” Nanny Piggins exclaimed in horror. “There’s all these strange words like ‘forsooth,’ ‘egad,’ and ‘prithee’ written through it. Is that from some Polynesian dialect I’m not familiar with?”

  “No, it’s English,” Samantha assured her. “It’s the type of English everyone spoke four hundred years ago when Shakespeare wrote the play.”

  “Really?” said Nanny Piggins, not believing that anybody would actually talk such gobbledygook just because they had been alive four centuries ago.

  Nanny Piggins’s disapproval did not end there. She had only been reading a few more minutes when she became so appalled, she leaped to her feet and threw the play on the floor in disgust.

  “Piffle!” exclaimed Nanny Piggins, wanting to say something much worse.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Derrick.

  “Hamlet,” declared Nanny Piggins, “is a very, very bad man.”

  “What has he done?” asked Michael curiously.

  “He was rude to his mother!” said Nanny Piggins disapprovingly.

  The children gasped. They knew Nanny Piggins did not approve of young men being rude to their mothers.

  “Just because he is the Prince of Denmark does not give him the right to speak to her that way,” ranted Nanny Piggins. She then picked up the play and kept reading, wanting to find out if his mother would get fed up and bite Hamlet’s leg.

  But Nanny Piggins was soon distracted by other fundamental faults in Shakespeare’s great work. “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” said Nanny Piggins as she avidly read on.

  “What is it?” asked Derrick.

  “This play is very violent,” said Nanny Piggins.

  “You like rough-and-tumble,” Michael reminded her.

  “Of course, everyone enjoys a good sword fight,” said Nanny Piggins. “But there are so many sword fights. This Shakespeare fellow needs a good editor. Someone to tell him to swap one or two of these sword fights for pie fights. That would be a lot more fun. And you would lose less characters that way.”

  As Nanny Piggins approached the end of Hamlet, tears began to trickle down her face, then she started to sob, and finally she began to wail loudly.

  “What’s wrong?” worried Boris, rushing to give his sister a big hug.

  “It’s the ending,” said Nanny Piggins. “It’s so awful.”

  “How awful?” asked Derrick.

  “It’s worse than the episode of The Young and the Irritable where Bethany and Rock get married on that Caribbean cruise ship with the bomb in the engine room.”

  The others were astonished.

  “How can anything be worse than episode 3,791 of TYATI?” asked Samantha. “That is the saddest program on television ever.”

  “The producers had to bring six characters back from the dead because they had so many complaints from viewers,” added Derrick.

  “Hamlet is worse than that,” said Nanny Piggins definitively as she finished the last page of the play and closed the book. “Well, that settled it. If I am going to star in this production, I will just have to rewrite the play.”

  “Can you do that?” asked Samantha. From everything Samantha’s English teacher had said, Samantha had come to believe that the words of Shakespeare were objects of sa
cred art—like Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings, Michelangelo’s sculptures, or Jamie Oliver’s cookbooks. They were something that should be in a museum and only be viewed from behind a velvet rope.

  “Of course I can,” said Nanny Piggins. “I have a pen, don’t I? And I’m only going to improve it. I’m sure if Shakespeare were alive today he would be grateful for my help.”

  And so Nanny Piggins got out a pen and twenty pounds of chocolate (for inspiration) and set to work improving Hamlet. She wrote all afternoon, all night, and into the next morning. The children even went to school so Nanny Piggins could have time to write (and Derrick could present his Marco Polo research). When they returned home, they found their exhausted nanny slumped on the sofa fast asleep, clutching a highly annotated copy of Hamlet.

  Later that day, when they arrived at the first rehearsal, things did not go quite as Nanny Piggins had imagined. Nanny Piggins had expected Mrs. Fortescue-Brown to be eternally grateful when she presented her new, improved version of Hamlet. But instead, Mrs. Fortescue-Brown immediately quit in disgust and stormed off in a huff because she expected everyone from the cast to rush after her and beg her to come back (which just goes to show how silly some people’s expectations can be).

  The problem was, the cast soon read Nanny Piggins’s Hamlet and agreed it was much better, although their judgment may have been compromised. Nanny Piggins had brought along two dozen large chocolate cakes, whereas Mrs. Fortescue-Brown had only brought a small bowl of carrot sticks. It was obvious who had the upper hand. Nanny Piggins was immediately elected the new director.

  In the weeks that followed, Nanny Piggins, Boris, and the children had a wonderful time rehearsing Hamlet with the Amateur Theater Society. The children learned so much, such as how to look even more beautiful than usual with the aid of half a million dollars’ worth of professional lighting; how to not really kill each other when having a pretend sword fight; and how to tell off your uncle if you think he’s poured poison in your father’s ear.

  So when Mr. Sriskandaraja caught Derrick climbing out of a window during a particularly boring poetry lesson and gave him the punishment of writing an essay on the themes of Hamlet, he was surprised to get back a brilliantly insightful essay revealing Derrick’s subtle and complex understanding of the psychoanalytical issues in the Bard’s great work.

  The big night of the first performance soon arrived.

  “Are you nervous, Nanny Piggins?” asked Samantha.

  “Oh no,” said Nanny Piggins. “I just feel bad for all the other playwrights who are going to be put to shame as soon as the public sees my masterpiece.”

  “Don’t you mean Shakespeare’s masterpiece?” reminded Michael.

  “I suppose he had something to do with it,” conceded Nanny Piggins begrudgingly. “I have kept some of his original character names, but really, the more I think about his version, the more I wonder how he ever got away with it.”

  The auditorium was jam-packed. Even all the standing room at the back of the theater was sold out. Mrs. Fortescue-Brown was there with all her friends, ready to hate the play and enjoy complaining about it at length. All the local Shakespeare lovers had arrived (both of them). All the pig fans were there (a surprisingly large group), who were interested to see how a pig would interpret the role. And finally there were the theater subscribers, people who bought the tickets long in advance and so felt they had to go, even though they did not want to.

  When they had all found their seats and the house lights were dimmed, everyone in the audience was fully expecting to be totally bored (some of them were even hoping to get in a nap and had brought along neck pillows). So they were totally shocked when, as soon as the curtain opened, they were showered with the sparks of a thousand fireworks and deafened by cannon fire while a giant bear shot down from the back of the theater on a flying fox, screaming, “Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself!”

  Nanny Piggins’s Hamlet had begun. It is amazing what stunts, pyrotechnics, and a real motorcycle chase through the audience can do to liven up sixteenth-century literature. Nanny Piggins had written out Hamlet’s drippy girlfriend, Ophelia, and replaced her with the much more exciting Phillipa, a motorcycle-riding guitar player who runs off and leaves Hamlet so she can become an astronaut. She got rid of the bit where Hamlet was rude to his mother and put in a scene where Hamlet’s mother gave him a stern talking-to about always showing appropriate respect to women. And she replaced the bloodthirsty ending where everyone gets stabbed with a happy ending where everyone gets cake. Altogether it was the most wonderful, touching, rollicking play ever performed anywhere in any language.

  After laughing, then crying, then laughing some more, the audience got to their feet and gave a cheering standing ovation. Everyone, including Mrs. Fortescue-Brown, was in one-hundred-percent agreement that it was the best play ever.

  So Nanny Piggins, Boris, and the children returned home in high spirits. Even Mr. Green was happy. Everyone had said he was very convincing as a tree.

  “That was amazing!” gushed Michael.

  “I never knew theater could be so exciting and dangerous!” exclaimed Samantha delightedly while holding an ice pack to her forehead, where she had been struck by a rogue firework.

  “It’s just a shame you can never perform Nanny Piggins’s Hamlet again,” said Derrick.

  For when the owner of the theater had arrived, he was horrified to see the hole in the roof (where Nanny Piggins had been fired out of a cannon for her curtain call), the motorcycle track marks torn into the carpet where Phillipa had made her dramatic exit to join NASA, and the fire brigade putting out the curtain that had caught alight during the grand cake-eating finale, which naturally involved even more fireworks. The theater owner had made Nanny Piggins promise to never ever direct, produce, or star in any production of any theatrical performance ever again. And since Nanny Piggins believed in making your exit while your audience still held you in awed amazement, she agreed.

  “It’s for the best,” said Nanny Piggins. “If you put on a play that good, everyone will want to see it. It would be cruel to the public to do any less than five performances a night. And a workload that great would become exhausting after five or six years. No, better to retire now, knowing I have written and performed the world’s greatest play.”

  “With a little help from Shakespeare,” reminded Samantha.

  “Hmm, a little,” muttered Nanny Piggins.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Nanny Piggins and the Runaway Lion

  anny Piggins and the children were putting the finishing touches on a beautiful wedding cake. No one they knew was getting married, but Nanny Piggins was not going to let a little thing like that stop them from enjoying a seven-tier chocolate cake with marzipan icing and handmade sugar flowers. The four of them had been making the cake all morning long. It would have been finished sooner, but they kept stopping to eat all the ingredients (they’d had to go back to the supermarket three times already). Plus they each had to take turns hugging Boris and handing him tissues as he sat crying in the corner, because he was Russian and weddings always made him emotional.

  So Derrick and Samantha were holding a ladder while Nanny Piggins stood on the top step and reached precariously across to pipe the words I love cake on the center of the uppermost layer when, suddenly, Mr. Green burst in through the back door, banging into the stepladder and knocking Nanny Piggins to the floor. (Fortunately she was a flying pig, so she landed gracefully on her bottom.)

  “Quick, hide! Nowhere is safe! It’s all over the news! We’re all doomed!” shrieked Mr. Green as he ran down the corridor, up the stairs, and into his bedroom, where he slammed the door and locked it.

  “What on earth has happened to your father?” asked Nanny Piggins as she picked herself up and dusted off her dress. “He’s even ruder than normal.”

  “Perhaps he’s finally snapped,” suggested Michael.

  “Or perhaps he’s being audited,” guessed Samantha, knowing noth
ing frightened her father more.

  “Or perhaps he needs a hug,” said Boris. (Being a bear, bear-hugging was his solution to most problems.)

  “Maybe we should watch the news and see what he’s all worked up about,” suggested Derrick.

  So the five of them sat down to watch TV. Nanny Piggins did not normally approve of watching the news because it was always miserable and there were often disturbing images that put you off whatever you were eating. Plus they insisted on giving all the sports scores at the end, which always made Nanny Piggins’s eyes roll back into her head from boredom. But on this occasion, the first news item was indeed shocking, and they could soon see why Mr. Green was behaving like an even bigger cowardly custard than normal.

  “A large female lion was seen walking through a shopping center earlier this morning,” announced the news anchor. “Citizens are urged to remain calm and stay indoors until the animal has been captured.”

  “Those are our shops!” exclaimed Samantha, as they watched grainy footage of the rear end of a lion disappearing into their local bookstore, which was right next door to the supermarket where they had bought one hundred pounds of sugar, thirty bags of flour, and five blocks of chocolate (to eat on the way home) earlier that morning.

  “Should we lock all the doors and windows?” Derrick panicked.

  “Pish!” said Nanny Piggins. “It’s only a lion. And besides, there’s something about that lion… she looks familiar.”

  “I know what you mean,” agreed Boris. “We could only see her hind leg. And it was very fuzzy. But there was something about that fuzzy hind leg…”