Did you see one of our performances of The War in Heaven during The York Mystery Plays Festival 2026? If so, we would love to hear what you thought of the show. We aim to enrich the lives of audience members and creative participants with our work, so we really value your opinions and take them on board to help shape our future projects. We’d greatly appreciate it if you’d take a moment to fill out our Audience Feedback Form – it will be available until 30th July 2026. (If you were involved in making the show, you have been emailed a different form asking about your experience as a participant.)
Category Archives: Historic
The Mystery Plays: A Wrap-up
It’s in the spirit of #mysteryplaymonday, even though it’s midweek. We’re saying farewell to the York Mystery Plays 2026, to our wonderful cast and creatives, and we’re also in the middle of a clear-out of stuff! But, with a few days to process behind her, our play’s director is taking a few minutes to reflect on the ups, downs, and joys of “The War in Heaven”.
What happened to Mystery Play Monday- isn’t this a Wednesday? I can hear you asking, and you’re right. The answer is simple: we all needed a couple days to rest, recover, dismantle, and let go. I for one have been a puddle of emotion about the ending of the mystery plays: pride in what we accomplished, joy at a successful run, happiness for having met so many new, wonderful people who I hope will stay in touch… that all runs right up against the wall of ending, saying goodbye, and physically pulling apart something that you’ve spent months building. It’s very abrupt, and it’s a lot to process.
That’s theatre, always has been and always will be, but I never really find it any easier. So I needed a bit of breathing space to mentally process everything before I could sit down and write my reflections on it.
The mystery plays are incredibly central to my life and my story, they’re the genesis of HIDden as an organisation, but I can’t pretend they are always an unalloyed blessing. Street theatre is difficult. Amateur theatre is too. Throw in processional staging through the streets of a busy city, and eight or nine different companies, and there are a lot of moving parts; even if we, as HIDden, don’t have to deal with all of those things, the totality of the whole means that there is a lot to organise, and a lot which can fall through cracks. There were definitely days where “frustrating” is the only answer I could have given, if someone asked me how things were going. It would be a misstep for me to paint over that as if it weren’t a truth just as real as the good parts. It was hard work- incredibly hard- and it’s always done by far fewer people than is ideal.
But it’s also a moment to feel incredibly proud. Our cast and crew were amazing. Nine performances without a single line blip or choreography mistake (I’m not saying there weren’t a few minor issues, but they were largely mechanical or entirely out of our control, like having a building alarm go off in the middle of the Shambles performance on Wednesday night, through which the cast sailed with imperturbable grace). I’ve heard nothing but positive comments from people who saw it, so while there are always things one knows one could do better, I feel safe in saying that the production did what all theatre is meant to do, first and foremost: it engaged and entertained its audience.
I can’t praise the people in our group enough. The waggon master and crew did an incredible job of moving Large Rolley, our waggon, through the streets, with a smooth elegance. (This may sound like an odd thing to say but trust me, I’ve seen waggons struggle!) The volunteers who helped with costumes and puppets leaped in with both feet and weren’t afraid to offer suggestions for how to achieve the end goal, which I always appreciate, because we’re all in this together! The creative team brought ideas and viewpoints that were fresh and unlike anything we’ve ever done. And the cast- amazingly, I just read through a journal entry I wrote right after audition week, where I said that I had such confidence in our cast that I wasn’t nervous about the production from that very early date! That’s awfully early to be counting any dramatic chickens, but that instinct that we had a very solid group of people proved out through the rehearsal and performance process. They really were delightful and interesting people, whose enthusiasm for acting and the Mystery Plays in particular made me feel utterly secure. They were also wonderfully flexible, as we reworked scenes and hammered out technical difficulties, like how to change Lucifer from a white feathered angel to a singed and burnt denizen of hell. Their suggestions and insights also helped shape the show.
It’s always the people that make the Mystery Plays what they are. I imagine that has always been true: the guilds that originally staged them were communities, bound together by a shared trade, a shared city, and often close family ties as well. I think about those people a lot during our production and its development, because I feel like they are part of it, too. In fact, if someone asked me to sum up why I love the mystery plays in one word, that word would be connection. It’s the connections that we make between different companies, working together for this large-scale shared event, and even more the connections among the people we work with directly. Hopefully, new friendships are formed that will last beyond just this play, maybe for years or even a lifetime. We find connection with the guilds and their members, and we connect with audience members, who are part of our story even if we never know their names. And I think we connect with everyone who has ever been part of the plays in previous years, or even previous centuries, be they twentieth-century or fourteenth. When we work on the plays, we’re stretching our hands out to touch theirs, just as they were, perhaps unconsciously, reaching forward to us, their posterity. We’re all connected, everyone who has had some contact with these plays, as part of York’s story. I know it’s Rome that is called “the eternal city” but if you’ve ever lived in York, you will appreciate that the name feels right for it, too.
The Mystery Plays can sometimes be the concentrated distillation of those features of theatre which drive us most to despair- but they are equally intensely the kind of event that brings out all the best aspects of theatre as well. It tends to be the latter that we remember the most clearly: the shiver of excitement when your waggon rolls by York Minster and you feel the weight of history on you, the adrenaline of performing several times in quick succession under incredibly varied conditions, the happy rush (and tears) when you realise that it’s finished and you’ve all done so brilliantly. I hope everyone involved will treasure these memories, as I will, for the rest of their lives. And I hope we’ve made it an experience that will bring them back for more historic drama, because there are so many more stories to share.
‘The War in Heaven’ digital programme available
In light of the first performance day of the York Mystery Plays 2026, we are pleased to share the digital programme for our production of The War in Heaven. Find it here
Cast & Creative Team for “The War in Heaven”
We are excited to share the cast & creative team who are bringing forth The War in Heaven for the York Mystery Plays Festival 2026. Find out more about our production on our Current Projects page.
| CAST | |
|---|---|
| Angel Ensemble | Freddie Amy |
| Fallen Angel Ensemble | Christopher Bradshaw |
| 1st Angel | Jacob Carhart |
| 2nd Fallen Angel | Robin Denley Bowers |
| 3rd Fallen Angel | Oliver Eardley |
| Lucifer | Colin Hayes |
| 2nd Angel | Imogen Lisle-Clarke |
| God | Ehren Mierau |
| 3rd Angel | Will Seddon |
| 1st Fallen Angel | Sue Whyte |
| CREATIVE TEAM | |
|---|---|
| Director | Laura-Elizabeth Rice |
| Designer | Laura-Elizabeth Rice |
| Composer | Samuel Fernandes Morais |
| Musical Director | Samuel Fernandes Morais |
| Puppet Director | Catherine McRae |
| Assistant Director | Irem Saticioglu |
Pathelin on the Web
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?
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!
Two Medieval French Farces: A Reading
Director’s Notes: Comedy Tonight!
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!
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!
Historic Drama: an invitation or too big a challenge?
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.
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