Category Archives: Drama

Pathelin on the Web

Posted on by under Drama, Farces, Historic, Musings

It’s #FarcesFriday! This week our Farces’ director searches the internet for productions of Pathelin, to see how widely it has travelled and how many different ways the play has been performed.

I have a very strict rule about not watching productions of a play I’m working on- I don’t want my own ideas about it, and that of my collaborators, to get hung up by someone else’s concepts. Sometimes, once you’ve seen something, as the saying goes you can’t unsee it. But I’m still curious, and being so far down our farces rabbit hole, I decided it was okay to be at least a little bit nosy, so I started looking up Master Pierre Pathelin online. What kind of online presence did the play have?

In terms of images, book covers from various editions are what come up the most frequently, but a dive into Wikimedia Commons, of all places, yielded rather more interesting fruit. (I’m pinning these to a new Pinterest board, if you’re curious to see them.) The woodcut prints which accompany some editions of the text are the most frequent images that aren’t a volume cover. They portray moments such as Pierre talking to his wife Guillemette, “buying” cloth from Guillaume, and the trial scene before the Judge- in short, the major scenes from the play. There are a couple sketches of Victorian actors portraying some of the characters, which look as if they may have been intended for publication, perhaps in a magazine or newspaper devoted to the theatre, as well as an advertising cartoon for the same production. There are photos from a late Victorian production which remind one that the lines between melodrama, pantomime, and farce are blurry. Available for perusal, too, is the music and libretto for an operatic version of the play (as well as photographs which suggest it was translated and staged in other languages, outside of France). Pathelin, this tells us, didn’t just spawn sequels, but adaptation into other art forms as well.

As a beloved- and easy-to-stage- piece of French dramatic history, it’s not surprising to find Pathelin well represented on YouTube. You can watch primary school-aged children enacting scenes, which surprised me as I would have thought the comedy was a little bit more sophisticated than the average nine- or ten-year old would enjoy. High school drama groups also perform it, as do the more expected university students and professional companies. There’s one version where a family decided to have some fun with their video camera and record themselves doing scenes from the play in their own home! The majority of the online videos show performances in French, including performances from classes who are learning French as a second language. And not all those which are linguistically French are nationally French: the National Theatre of Senegal has performed Pathelin and put it online. I found at least one iteration in Portuguese, as well as a black-and-white film version, professionally made in 1961, translated into Danish, and another iteration which, while possibly still performed in French, was presented in what was then known as Yugoslavia. 

What is the takeaway from this online Pathelin blitz? Well, first, it’s simply evidence that those who know the play have always found it entirely entertaining and worth staging; it’s not simply a medieval relic known only to footnote-grubbing academics, it’s a play that has been performed, at least occasionally, across many centuries and in many countries. It’s also far better known to the French than the English, which is fair- the original is in their language- but also a bit of a shame, because there is nothing about the play that is so specific, culturally or linguistically, that it can’t be enjoyed equally in translation. (This is why it still felt right for us at HIDden- it’s a historic drama that in our wider culture isn’t especially well known, though it has every right to be!) And, indeed, the variety of countries where it appears in even these limited records indicate that its basic ideas and humour transcend borders and cultural differences.

Another interesting observation is that, if we may go by the costumes, it’s almost always staged very clearly as medieval. (The interesting exception is one illustration that places the characters in Georgian dress. Dating from the mid nineteenth century, their choice is unusual in terms of choosing to present a historical version of Pathelin, but one set in a different time than its origins.) What I find curious about this adherence to medieval dress is that the play isn’t socompletely grounded in medieval circumstances that it must be medieval to make sense. YouTube is, of course, a limited sample, and I feel very confident in assuming that there have been “modern dress” Pathelins, with the lawyers in suits and carrying briefcases. But it doesn’t seem to be a particularly common choice. Contrast this with productions of Shakespeare’s plays, which have probably spent more time out of their own period than in. Why do some plays get locked into a particular time period while others, with no more or less internal requirement for being period-specific, don’t? I don’t actually know! But I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Even the limited data set which is this brief internet search speaks to the durability of the play. Across centuries, languages, and borders, the tale of a trickster lawyer and the people who try to cheat him in turn is universally appealing. Do other cultures have lawyer jokes? Pathelin’s popularity says yes! The next question is why, when it’s made it to such diverse places as Denmark and Yugoslavia, it’s still relatively unknown in the UK. This is indeed a mystery. At least we can hope that, by the middle of May, at least a few more people in York will have “met” this delightful text (along with its far more obscure but equally funny farce sibling, The Washtub) and joined the many who, around the world and across the years, have found delight in the antics of Pierre and his fellows!

This Marriage Is a Farce! Or Is It The Other Way Around?

Posted on by under Drama, Farces, Historic

It’s #FarcesFriday and our farces’ director is taking a look at the marriages that shape our two plays- how they they reflect medieval relationship tensions, and how they both reach beyond the stereotypes of this genre’s approach to marriages.

It’s easy to take it as a given that marriage in the Middle Ages was radically different from the partnerships of today. For starters, while we prioritise affection, companionability, and attraction, medieval marriage was far more about establishing the most advantageous ties in terms of power and property. In the western world of the 21st century, we expect that the choice of partners is ours; while arranged marriages were by no means universal in the Middle Ages, they also weren’t rare. And medieval gender roles were far less flexible than today. We benefit from the knowledge that if it really doesn’t work out, divorce exists as a feasible option, a safety hatch that people didn’t have five hundred years ago.

But at heart, the same basic premise must have been true: two people from different families are expected to spend a lifetime working together for mutual support and survival. Marriage doesn’t (with apologies to West Side Story) actually “make of our hearts one heart”- it’s still two individuals, with different histories, experiences, backgrounds, needs, wishes, and perspectives, trying to find a way to work together across those differences to make “one life” together, shared. Medieval women legally ceased to exist upon marriage, subsumed into their husbands’ identity, but both  remained individuals in the daily reality of life. 

These challenges and negotiations between partners have always been ripe for comedic uses. Mother-in-law jokes, marital misunderstandings, the fine line between fighting and flirting- these staples of modern sitcoms were well in place in the Middle Ages, including in our two farces. The Washtub is fully “marital comedy”. Pierre Pathelin is not built around marriage as a theme, but a Pathelin without a Guillemette is a very different storyline.

One of the things that made The Washtub appealing, when we were looking at different farces and trying to choose two, is the fact that it’s highly representative of a popular farce genre. A lot of farces are about marriages that aren’t harmonious. There are themes within the genre: the infidelity of a wife (men’s infidelity isn’t seen as funny, perhaps because it was somewhat permissible), or the extreme stupidity of a husband, are two common sub-genres. The Washtub leans towards the latter, but… is Jaquinot stupid? Or is he more clever than he initially lets on? This is one of the interesting questions an actor can ask; playing stupid and being stupid are wildly different things, and Jaquinot could do either, or both in turn. 

What definitely isn’t in the play, somewhat unusually, is extreme violence. Domestic abuse- and it comes from both parties in most plays- is rife in medieval farce; they’re often like a Punch & Judy show enacted with actual bodies, with an emphasis on the “punch” part. I do think there are ways of staging those plays that would take the violence into a comic place rather than an alarming one, but I like that The Washtub is a battle of wits rather than one of fists. Jaquinot and Jaquinette like to get the better of one another, and they both want to assert their own primacy within the relationship, but they don’t raise a hand against one another. (Indeed, if one does believe that Jaquinette is in danger within the washtub, not offering a hand is the entire joke!)

We don’t know what brought Jaquinot and Jaquinette together. As peasants, it’s just as possible that they made a marriage of their own desiring, as that it was arranged by their parents. (Certainly Jaquinette’s mother isn’t terribly impressed with her son-in-law! But if it was an arranged marriage, she may have had little say in the matter, with her husband conducting all negotiations.) This question might change how an actor approaches either of these characters- a marriage begun in romance that has soured as reality set in, is a very different situation from a permanent attachment than two people didn’t choose but are still stuck to work out. We do know that, as far as Jaquinette is concerned, Jaquinot isn’t pulling his own weight. “You’re leaving me to do everything, and we don’t even have good sex!” feels like a fairly modern complaint, but it’s Jaquinette’s as well, half a millennium ago. 

I think one of the things that makes the play interesting is not just its familiar feeling- these problems could be any couple’s problems, albeit they take it to an absurd place- but the fact that, for modern audiences, at least, our sympathies can be shared between both parties. Jaquinette’s complaints may be resonant with the reality of so many women’s lives! But we also enjoy seeing Jaquinot get his own back. And how you choose to end the play, in terms of staging, may give the opportunity to further balance the scales. (Medieval productions would not do this- they’d end with a man winning the day, “order” in the form of female subservience being restored. But we’re not medieval, and we can choose to nudge and wink while thumbing our noses at this ideal.)

Master Pierre Pathelin‘s take on marriage is completely different, and is a true rarity among medieval farces. They are, uniquely, partners. Guillemette isn’t fooled by her husband, as so many others are, and she’s happy to put him in his place. But one of the interesting things about her is that even when doing so, it feels almost affectionate. “Don’t try to kid me, mate, I know you. You’re a charlatan but you’re my charlatan,” seems to be Guillemette’s relationship with her husband. And when he needs her help in conniving Guillaume the Clothier that he, Pathelin, is ill and out of his wits, Guillemette jumps in and proves herself just as convincing a conniver as her husband. Moreover, and again unusually in the marital dynamic common of farce, Pierre asks her to help him. He includes his wife in his plans and knows he can’t succeed without her aid. It’s a shame we don’t get to see Guillemette with him in the courtroom scene; it’s not difficult to imagine that she would continue to find clever ways to assist in his machinations. 

We don’t get to know much about the dynamic shared between Pierre and Guillemette when they aren’t scheming. But, while it’s fair to note that Pierre’s success directly benefits his wife (he’s getting cloth for her dress, as well as his own clothing), it feel safe to assume that most women wouldn’t go along with their husband’s shenanigans if they didn’t, fundamentally, feel a degree of partnership. If theirs is not a marriage of equals, it is at least a marriage of equally clever, scheming, and unscrupulous individuals, well-matched in their talents for duping others. They’ll lie to anyone but eachother. And that, in the grand tradition of villainous couples, is kind of romantic in its own strange way!

Both of our plays give a relatively more benign spin on marriage than the average farce; I won’t pretend they’re truly representative. But I’d like to hope that they’re more representative of medieval marriage than the more typical farces. Pathelin and Guillemette genuinely seem to like one another- they’ve figured out how to get along and work together for the common cause of their life together. Jaquinot and Jaquinette are likely much younger, and they’re still negotiating what the rest of their marriage will look like. Let us hope that they can arrive at a similar place in time, and share a life of real partnership, whether it is shared chores or chicanery!

A Different Trinity: History, Law & Drama

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Drama, Farces, History

#FridayFarces is back, this time with a consideration of how history, drama, and legal proceedings can interact to instruct as well as entertain us.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a person who doesn’t enjoy drama in some form or another. For most people these days, it’s television and cinema; whether you love television or going to the opera, the point is that the very idea of drama is something that virtually everyone finds appealing. (Tell anyone that you work in theatre or television and watch their reaction.) Law seems to come in for a similar, probably equally misplaced, aura of glamour: scroll through your television menu and I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any hour of the day when some legally-based show isn’t airing- in some places there are entire channels dedicated to airing legal cases. Law is drama, in most people’s eyes. 

History sadly comes in for a different response. Only yesterday, a young family friend still in university was saying how much she “can’t get into” history. I understand where she’s coming from: in school, we teach historically abominably, a list of tedious facts purged entirely of humanity and intrigue. But history is all about drama, people, and law; and the drama of law can be a gateway drug when it comes to learning to love history.

I was fortunate to discover this young, entirely unintentionally. A favourite book from my high school years (still on my shelf!), Mary S. Hartman’s Victorian Murderesses, uses famous, well-documented trials to shine light on the often hidden realities of women’s lives, and public responses to them. My brilliant freshman year university course “The Historian as Detective”, gave me books like Natalie Zemon Davis’s enjoyable (and short!) The Return of Martin Guerre* and Words and Deeds in Renaissance Rome, by Thoms V. and Elizabeth S. Cohen, both of which rely heavily on trial records to illuminate rural French and urban Italian society, respectively. What I learned then is that the law leaves a detailed record, in a way that very few other historical records can, showing ordinary people caught unexpectedly, made suddenly visible, their everyday lives in captured in metaphorical amber, and set down on paper. Moreover, while trials may be representative more of the “outliers” than their more “ordinary” contemporaries, by showing what was unusual, or not permissible, or in debate, we can understand what was normal, permitted, and accepted by society.

This is one reason why the history-drama-law triad is so important to both the casually curious and serious scholarship. Our farces aren’t quite in this category- there is of course much very erudite research about them!- but primarily they are, to an audience, merely fun. But they reveal other ways that this trio present themselves and talk between themselves.

Both Master Pierre Pathelin and Le Cuvier (to give The Washtub its French title) may have been written and performed by lawyers: The Society of the Basoche, the company of law clerks in medieval Paris. The Basoche are a fascinating group, and I hope to dedicate a day to talking about this most unusual medieval guild at a later date, but for now it’s enough to say that their evolution was an entirely logical phenomenon. The law is full of emotional highs and lows, triumphs and tragedies, justice and injustice- literally the things that define drama, even if there is no stage in sight. Moreover, the Basoche had its own internal jurisdiction, which allowed its students to practice some form of “real” law, the way a mock trial team at a university may do today. If there weren’t any cases on the go, they wrote their own, including causes grasses, mocking lawsuits for Carnival, which allowed them to create “cases” that were particularly absurd or scandalous. Writing true farce, then, without the necessity of a legal framework, may have been an entirely foreseeable next step. By the mid-fifteenth century, the time at which both of our plays were likely composed, the Basoche were working with the company that staged fully religious plays, to contribute to a full day of every sort of drama: morality, mystery, sottie and farce all going on a shared playbill for the public’s day of entertainment. Indeed, the Basoche is today remembered more vividly as a comedy-dramatic enterprise than its actual purpose within the legal-education system. (Thus, to further our theme of interconnectivity between our three themes: the law gave us drama, and today the drama has preserved for us something of the history of law.)

In addition to this very real tie to actual attorneys and clerks, both Pathelin and The Washtub contain aspects of law within the narrative of the drama. The Washtub deals with a contract between a man and his wife, one they draw up in full view of the audience, who functionally serve as “witnesses”, creating what would, in effect, have thus been considered a legally binding document. (One could imagine a sequel in which both husband and wife seek out attorneys to argue about the validity, or amendment, to the contract they have somewhat carelessly drawn up!) In Pathelin the connection to law is still greater: Pierre Pathelin claims to be a lawyer, and the final scene of the play is a trial in a courtroom before a judge. It’s unclear if Pathelin is any sort of attorney at all: Howard Graham Harvey, whose book Theatre of the Basoche is enormously helpful in making sense of the legal aspects of Pathelin, says that “Pathelin’s lack of education raises the strongest presumption that he is nothing more than an unlicensed village practitioner.” In cities, legal training and licensing was becoming more rigorous, as the very existence of the Basoche shows, but in rural areas, the bar to setting oneself up at the bar of law was low; as with Pathelin, cleverness could substitute for a real education. If the play was indeed created by members of the Basoche, perhaps they were making a crack at untrained people who claimed the same mantle of “lawyer” that they so painstakingly studied to achieve. That said, the play also leaves us rather liking and admiring Pathelin, his trickery and audacity, so perhaps it’s less a critical dig and more a nudge and wink- lawyers appreciating that their profession often rewards finding ways to be clever that are just barely, but technically, within the bounds of the law. The play thus gives us a window, however distorted through comedic exaggeration, into village legal practice of the times, while also using it as a source for commentary and comedy. 

One need not, of course, be a student of all three disciplines. But the lawyer needs to understand precedent, or what happened in the past. The historian benefits from understanding the legal framework that shaped and was shaped by the society he or she studies. And those who appreciate the drama of both have a unique opportunity towards making material that might otherwise seem dull as fascinating, alive, and vibrant. We get to take the idea of drama and make it literal drama. Ours must surely be the best of all three worlds.

*Martin Guerre has been dramatised for the stage in multiple versions. The musical version, written by the same people who created Les Misérables, is an extremely interesting study in creating drama by marrying up different aspects of history, effectively destroying much strict historical veracity in pursuit of revealing a completely different aspect of history. I belive some of the women from Victorian Murderesses have also been turned into at least television drama, although I haven’t seen them and cannot say how closely they hewed to the historical record. Still, the fact that these stories were intriguing enough to become drama in the literal sense proves the point that legal history is ripe pickings for history-via-performance!

Two Medieval French Farces: A Reading

Posted on by under Drama, Farces, French Farces, Historic, News, Production
Click here for all the details.

Director’s Notes: Comedy Tonight!

Posted on by under French Farces, Historic, Musings

It’s #FarcesFriday, and our director, Laura-Elizabeth Rice, is back with reflections on choosing to work with medieval French farces, and how we chose our plays.

Two memories:

I’m six years old, listening to a group of boys sitting around one’s school desk. One of them is using a hand under his armpit to make noises that mimic gas, and they’re laughing like it’s the funniest thing they’ve ever heard. And I find myself thinking, I can’t wait to be an adult, so people won’t find fart jokes funny anymore, because they aren’t! (Oh, the innocence of youth!)

I’m eighteen and in university, in a class that’s supposed to be on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but our professor has decided that, instead, we’re going to be focusing on the question of “what is comedy?” He’s a young, early-career lecturer; it’s painfully obvious that he’s anxious to spit out the silver spoon he was born with, and his way of doing this is to argue strenuously that slapstick is the only valid form of comedy, because if you like anything else, you’re being a snob. I don’t think slapstick is funny at all. I’ll spend the semester arguing that watching someone be injured or made to feel embarrassed isn’t amusing, and that I don’t think that inherently makes me stuck-up.

I’m sharing these memories because it’s deeply ironic that I, of all people, should be spending time working on farces, a genre that relies heavily on physical and/or bodily humour… and irony is often a foundational part of comedy. Moreover, it’s worth knowing a little bit of that background, to help explain why, of all the farces in all the theatre in all the world (or at least, in France!), we should have settled on Master Pierre Pathelin and The Washtub for our upcoming reading.

Medieval comedy isn’t absent from the English canon of dramatic literature, but it’s quite limited, and exists entirely within wider dramatic genre that aren’t focused on laughs. Joseph’s Trouble About Mary is pretty funny, because it’s a pragmatic look at a Biblical moment that is usually held in pure reverence. The Second Shepherds’ Play is a strange combination of comedic folk play married to the more standard Christmas story. Our old friend, Mankind, has much bawdy humour, but its purpose is to be held up as an example of what not to be. There just isn’t a vast body of secular comedy from medieval England that exists solely because people wanted a laugh. 

It’s different in France. There are hundreds of farces from medieval France. Unfortunately, the majority aren’t available in translation; if you don’t read French- and medieval French at that!- these plays remain largely a literal and metaphorical closed book. This is changing (most notably, several collections translated and adapted by Jody Enders, which I highly recommend as entertaining reading even if you have zero interest in putting a farce onstage), but a lot– the majority- of the enormous body of farce remains just out of reach. So while I knew that, in deciding to present a comedy, we would be looking past English borders, the language question meant limitation among riches.

That said… once you start reading what is available in English, you confront the challenge of translation that isn’t about language or even France vs. England, but about cultures across time. My undergraduate lecturer was correct that slapstick has indeed stood the test of chronology- medieval people would have understood those six year old boys!- but the line of what is acceptable has definitely shifted. It’s quite shocking to realise that a significant percentage of medieval comedy is about violence, particularly domestic. Imagine watching a “Punch & Judy” show but with actors instead of puppets; men and women may give as good as they get, but the violence is unrelenting. There are those who argue that it is so exaggerated that it becomes comic, because it’s completely unrealistic, but we still felt it was over the line where we felt comfortable. 

The Washtub is marital comedy, but it still works as comedy if one ignores or excises stage directions that indicate the couple being violent towards one another- that is a disposable “extra” that isn’t necessary dramatically. Even without that, there is physical comedy, and it follows the slapstick trope of exaggeration of physical events: it’s unlikely that a grown, fully conscious woman would drown by falling into even a large medieval washtub in her own home; all she has to do is stand up! Thus much of the comedy centres around the absence of injury that the audience appreciates, but the character doesn’t; the rest is clever one-upmanship between spouses, of the sort that is still a staple of television sitcoms.

Pierre Pathelin is probably the best-known medieval French farce- possibly the best-known medieval French play, full stop, and I suspect that one of the reasons this is true is because it almost totally lacks violence-as-humour, so it hasn’t turned the corner into being more offensive than funny. It pokes fun at lawyers (another tradition that has carried on!), at unearned pomposity, and the idea of the clever scoundrel getting away with one-upping those considered his “betters” still resonates. It also includes a twist at the end that reminds me that my university lecturer did make some good points: reversal of expectation can be one of the criteria for defining comedy. In Pathelin, everybody is trying to cheat everyone else, and virtually everyone has some comeuppance along the way. 

I suspect that the same thing that made me read these plays and say, I want to do this!, is the same thing that has made them the best known among a fairly obscure genre: their surprisingly delicate balance between the hyperbolic actions of slapstick, and the jokes that ask the audience to contribute some thought or knowledge. You can appreciate them for exactly what they lay out in front of you- isn’t a man bleating “Baaa” in a courtroom ridiculous?- or you can be entertained because you know something about law and what Pathelin is faking. Or both. Meet them where you are. The medieval French writers gave us plays which understood what neither a younger version of me, nor my university teacher, did: that “funny” needn’t have a hierarchy; there are only different, and complimentary, ways of making an audience laugh.

An Exciting Announcement: York Mystery Plays 2026!

Posted on by under Drama, Historic, History, Mystery Plays, News, Production, York Mystery Plays 2026

We are still seeking expressions of interest for our backstage & offstage teams for The War in Heaven – please see our Jobs & Opportunities page.
We are particularly interested in hearing from potential Waggon Masters and Stage Managers.

We’re back!

It’s been a challenging series of years for us, as it has been for many small theatre groups across the UK, but we are thrilled to tell you that we don’t just have news to tease, we have exciting news right now.

This summer, the Mystery Plays are returning to the city centre of York, and HIDden will be with them!

The Mystery Plays is, effectively, the parent stem of HIDden Theatre. We exist because our founders were involved with a performance in the 2010 plays, and we decided we wanted to keep exploring and presenting historic drama from the past. So we came back in 2014, when the current team started working together. 

We all have incredibly happy memories of that experience, and have hoped circumstances would allow us to return. This year, after all the difficulties of the past years- through a pandemic and many changes of personal circumstance- we’re thrilled beyond measure to be working on The War in Heaven (traditionally The Fall of the Angels). It’s the first play in the cycle, so we’ll be leading the parade! It’s quite an exciting play, depicting both Heaven and Hell, and sets up the struggle between good and evil.

Along the way to production, we’re looking forward to sharing not just our journey, but also some history of the plays and the medieval world with you, and we’ll also be pointing out what else is going on, because this year it’s not just two days of performance, it’s an entire festival. So there’ll be lots of ways to discover the Mystery Plays… and lots of ways to get involved.

On that note… we are going to be acting as the “guild of waifs and strays”. That means that if you’re someone who has an interest in participating in the Plays, but you’re not a member of a group that’s already involved, we’re here! Whether you love to perform or you’re interested in backstage projects like building or costuming, or you’d like to be part of our waggon crew, there are going to be lots of opportunities. Get in touch!

The full cycle of plays will be performed on 28 June and 5 July, with the full festival arranged around those dates. We hope to see you there!

Another get together for York’s Theatre People – Saturday 12th November 1.00pm

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Casting Call, Drama, Musings, News, Production

Following the success of our impromptu get together for members of York’s Theatre community last month, we are running the event again – this time with a little more notice!

This is a chance for anyone involved or interested in theatre to chat and network with like-minded people and we are considering making it a regular occurrence.

Check out the event on Facebook – we hope to see you there!

York Theatre Meet & Greet, Saturday 8th October 2pm

Posted on by under Casting Call, Drama, News, Production

We’ve all come up against obstacles when working on projects.  Many of us have shows and the like that we are working on – be they in production or still at the idea stage – that we would like to either market or ask for help with.  Some people may even want to get a foot in the door of the York theatre scene.

So, we have decided to throw an impromptu get together for the theatre people of York; partly to have the chance to introduce ourselves to some new people but also because we know the theatrical community has a lot of knowledge and willigness to share, but not everyone knows how to approach those in the know.

Check out the event on Facebook – we hope to see you there!

Historic Drama: an invitation or too big a challenge?

Posted on by under Drama, Historic, Musings, News

Our Artistic Director shares her opinions on the willingness of others to tackle historic drama.

Because we like to take an interest in theatre beyond our own four walls, and be part of the wider York theatre community, we recently attended the AGM for another local theatrical organisation. Among the interesting moments was their discussion of the inclusion of classical (read “historic”) plays in their repertoire. Although some people seemed quite keen on the idea, it was noted that the more recent occasions when a historic play was calendared, finding a director proved unusually difficult. I had seen notices for those plays and, had I not been tied up with academic commitments, would have jumped on the opportunity, so it had never really occurred that other directors didn’t feel the same excitement.

Is there something about historic plays that directors in particular find intimidating or uninspiring? I don’t really know the answer for sure. Inarguably, there are possible aspects to approaching historic plays that might give someone pause – but it’s hard to talk about historic plays as if they are monolithic. Medieval dramas will present an obvious challenge with language… Renaissance, perhaps, with poetry… the Victorians with a sensibility which seems melodramatic and over the top today… but these are different issues, and any director might be intimidated by one set of circumstances while feel totally okay with another.

One thing which might be universal to historic plays is the feeling that you have to do something “innovative” with them. After all, they’ve been done (and in some cases, done and done and overdone) before, so there is an additional pressure to be ‘clever’. There is also the pressure to create ‘relevance’, rather than letting what relevance is present in the play itself pop to the surface and speak to you. And yet there are an awful lot of directors who are thrilled to tackle Shakespeare, whose plays have some of the densest performance history (and therefore really require something special to stand out). They may feel this is mitigated, ironically, by its very familiarity: if you can be reasonably sure the audience already knows the story of Romeo & Juliet, you might think that you can and should push the boat out pretty far, and clarity is less necessary. (I passionately disagree with that theory, by the way, but I’ve seen enough productions which clearly relied on foreknowledge by the audience to know that sometimes, whether deliberately or not, a dependence on audience awareness is taken for granted.) Conversely, I wonder if some directors feel that ‘classic’ plays require a certain degree of reverence, and therefore circumscribe creativity.

Of course, there is also the possibility that directors don’t have an aversion to historic plays, so much as a preference for modern ones. If you’re hooked on contemporary theatre styles, or plays dealing with contemporary matters, then obviously a call to direct a three-hundred-year-old play might not be particularly exciting to you.

I can’t really speak to the motivations of others, only speculate; because I find historic plays fascinating, it’s hard for me to get into the mind-set of avoiding them. Ultimately, however, I wonder if (perhaps ironically, all things considered) categorising plays by the date they were written isn’t missing the point. A story is interesting to you, or it isn’t, and perhaps by emphasizing the date of writing blinds people to that. Naturally directors need some form of filter to decide what projects they wish to pursue and which ones aren’t for them, but I’m not sure if using a date is the best one possible. Do we do a disservice to historic drama by focusing on that aspect, rather than other ways of describing plays? I really don’t know. A feature which I find attractive may be the opposite to someone else, and anyway you couldn’t get rid of the knowledge that an older play had a long history even if you didn’t describe it primarily as ‘historical’.

I don’t have all of the answers. The only one that I firmly believe to be true is that, if indeed there are people who have an aversion to plays of or about the past, the only way to convince them otherwise is to keep putting them on, continuing to make them as interesting as possible, every chance we get.

So, What Do You Really Think?

Posted on by under A Journey with Jonson, Ben and Steenie, Ben Jonson, Drama, Musings, Production, The Devil is an Ass

As both a theatre director and historian, our Artistic Director has a variety of experience looking at the sincerity and manipulation of beliefs – themes which are present in both parts of A Journey with Jonson. Here are some of her thoughts.

Among the many things that is shared by theatre and studying history is the challenge of getting inside someone else’s head. Both often involve trying to come to terms with the possible reasons why people do certain things. In theatre about the past, there is an extra difficulty: not only is it a matter of trying to make sense of another person’s thinking, but it is about doing so when their entire world view, the matrix of their society and culture, was different. And yet, there are questions about what people actually thought which were probably just as valid in earlier times as now; the difference, perhaps, is that we are more comfortable with articulating them.

One of these unspoken questions is at the heart of Ben and Steenie, and is further explored in The Devil is an Ass: what do people actually believe, when are they putting on the appearance of a belief for their own personal agenda, and when are they using the belief of others for pragmatic reasons? If you’re a political or religious leader, do you truly buy everything you say? Or, with your “behind the scenes” knowledge, is true belief set aside for political reality?

Few occasions in history illustrate the possible views on these questions as well as the issue of witchcraft in the early modern period, and an accusation of witchcraft is one of the significant plot threads of Ben and Steenie. There seems to be a general consensus that many people of the era very sincerely believed in the presence and malevolence of witches among ordinary citizens – including, for at least some of his life, King James I/VI. But those frequently accused of being witches tended to be those (largely women) who in some way didn’t conform to community norms, so their accusations could be either the assumption that this nonconformity in some way truly indicated an evil presence, or was a more cynical attempt at bringing recalcitrant neighbours to heel through fear (without the actual belief that they were dabbling in black magic). Revenge for perceived wrongs – a direct abuse of the system – is another possible reason why someone might be accused, as is the case in Ben and Steenie, although in the play it isn’t entirely clear that this is in opposition to genuine belief; most of these situations aren’t mutually exclusive.

While Ben and Steenie silently posits these questions, and gives the audience different answers, The Devil is an Ass is Jonson’s more overt iteration of the issue. The play rolls its eyes at those who would believe anything and everything, but it also pokes fun at those who would take advantage of that blind belief. The fact that Fitzdotterel’s desire to meet a devil is patently ridiculous is also turned on its ear somewhat by the fact that, in the world of the play, devils are real, and Fitzdotterel’s wish is – unbeknownst to him – granted; Merecraft’s schemes sound absurd but aren’t as far off from real ventures as might be assumed.

One play approaches the questions of belief, sincerity, gullibility, and manipulation from a gleefully comic standpoint and the other from a more serious angle. There are no definite answers, as one can only know the answers within their own personal experiences. From our standpoint in production, the functional question is what an actor makes of these matters, and what answers he or she assigns to the part being played. These are the kind of choices that make acting the craft that it is. And the chance to explore different potential permutations of these questions is one of the great joys of working on plays about past eras. It may never give any definitive answers, but it offers insight into possibility.