HOWZAT

He writes the plays himself, and what he’s most proud of is how literal they are. “What you see at Wintershall is the basic, biblical story of Christ’s birth. There’s a moment in the play when the Angel Gabriel delivers the line, ‘And that is how it was’, and it encapsulates the spirit of the play,” he says.

For Hutley and his wife, the plays have become a kind of retirement hobby on a grand scale: the planning, preparation and rehearsals now take up a vast amount of their time. They’d never have believed, they say, how big it would grow; but from the start, it was clear that actors and audience were touched. “For months after that first nativity, people would come up to us and say, ‘You will do another next Christmas, won’t you?’” remembers Hutley.

There are some delightful Ambridge-style touches. The extended Hutley family, for example, have always been centre-stage: three out of four of the couple’s children, plus partners and offspring, live on the estate and have parts in the plays. Every year sees the senior Hutleys in some role: this year Peter plays Simeon and Ann is Anna (they were the couple who waited for the infant Jesus at the temple when his parents first took him there). The first Jesus was their grandson Ivan; over the years since, it has usually been a Hutley baby in the manger, and their daughter Henrietta Fiddian-Green says there were times when she felt distinctly under pressure to produce a baby at the right moment of the year. “Every year my mother would say, ‘We want good news from someone by Easter.’ And what she meant by that was, she wanted someone in the family to be pregnant by then so there would be a small baby for the nativity play in December.”

But as the plays grew, the quest was on for more people to join the cast and to work backstage. The Hutleys became dab hands at recruiting new blood – often from the most unlikely quarters. “I had never so much as acted in a play at school,” remembers full-time mother Lisa Rodrigues, who lives in Haslemere, a few miles from Wintershall. “But I had a new baby, and the Hutleys were desperately looking for someone with a new baby to play Mary – they like, if possible, to have a mother-and-child combination in the roles, often with the real father playing Joseph, too.

“My baby, Marie-Thérèse, was only a week old when I bumped into an old friend by chance. He was already acting in the nativity play, and Peter had told everyone involved in it that they had to help find a Mary. This friend thought that I’d be perfect, and within a few hours he’d got a copy of the script over to me.”

Others have been similarly roped in. Financial adviser Tim Hendy, 50, plays Joseph in this year’s nativity and has been in every play since 1996 – as with many of those involved, he’s completely hooked. He was recruited after a chance conversation between his wife and Mrs Hutley. “Ann comes across as a sweet and innocent little old lady, but she’s determined underneath, and when she’s after something she gets it,” he says. “They were short of men that year, and she persuaded my wife that I’d be perfect for a part. I couldn’t resist going along to see what it was all about, and I liked what I saw. It’s been a big part of my life ever since.”

Once you’re in, it seems, it’s hard to let go. Although most of the cast live within a ten or so mile radius of Wintershall, there are some who commute from further afield to take part. This year’s Angel Gabriel, for example, is travelling from Scotland after she moved from the local village, Bramley, but didn’t want to give up her annual participation in the nativity play: other actors are rolling in from Carlisle and the Isle of Wight. “They either stay with friends in the area, or they camp,” says Hendy. “It’s almost a pilgrimage for them: when you’re part of the play, it becomes something that you want to do every year. What we do here is to go back to the story at its centre, the real story of Christmas… and there aren’t many places where you get that these days.”

Many of the actors are Christians of one sort or another, but some are non-believers. One year the parts of Mary and Joseph were even played by a Jewish couple. “What people are drawn to, I think, is the spirit of what we’re about – it speaks to them, it means something,” says Hutley.

The Hutleys’ zeal shines through, and never more so than when Mrs Hutley describes the time when an elderly woman died in the middle of a performance. “She had a heart attack, and while she was lying there the choir were singing and people were praying around her. It was the best – the very best – way to go: I hope I go like that. She must have felt she was being carried off by angels!” The woman’s family, says Ann, come to the play every year to remember her.

For the actors, taking part in the play gives an insight into what life must have been like for their biblical alter egos. “The barn is absolutely freezing cold, so you’re worried about the baby the whole time – just as Mary herself would have been,” says Henrietta Fiddian-Green. Beth Snowden, a 23-year-old student who is playing Mary this year – for once baby Jesus isn’t her own, but is a baby Beth’s mother recently fostered – says she’s got a whole new take on the biblical account of Christ’s birth. “You’re feeling cold, you’re tired, you’ve been on the go for hours, you’re desperately trying to hang on to this donkey and you ache all over. You start to really understand what it was all about for them,” she says.

And it’s that authenticity that transmits itself to the audience. As they trek down the hillside after the performance, there’s one scene everyone remembers: the tableau of Mary and Joseph, and their baby, with the cattle behind them and the shepherds on their knees. Whether you’re a believer or not, it’s a powerful image – however strange it might be to have found it just off the A3, in the middle of a field in deepest Surrey.

The Wintershall Nativity runs from this evening until December 19 (www.wintershall-estate.com)

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