Category Archives: Musings

The Mystery Plays: A Wrap-up

Posted on by under Drama, Historic, Musings, Mystery Plays, York Mystery Plays 2026

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.

In the Home Stretch

Posted on by under Drama, Musings, Mystery Plays, York Mystery Plays 2026

It’s the final #mysteryplaymonday before production! It’ll be a busy week here at HIDden, but our play’s director takes a moment to reflect on the challenges, successes, and final development for the show. 

By this time next week we’ll have finished the first day of the Mystery Plays and The War in Heaven. We’ve been working flat out- more than flat out, really!- to make sure everything is ready, so if you don’t see us posting much online this week, you’ll understand that making sure everything is in good order is the main priority. As of last night, we not only have our waggon (“Large Rolley”), but we have a complete set built on it. There is a suitcase full of costumes, ready for a final ironing and smoothing out, sitting in the back of my car. The puppets are currently “sleeping” on the waggon bed. And, most importantly, the cast has been consistently having excellent show runs in the rehearsal room. 

Tonight will be the first time the cast meets our waggon. This is both extremely exciting and a challenging step, because it inevitably takes all the brilliant work you’ve seen in the rehearsal room and knocks it back on its bum briefly. This is just because it’s the very abrupt introduction of a large number of small but significant adjustments: real stairs instead of having steps marked out on the floor with tape, the extra space around the waggon and having to manoeuvre around the waggon tongue, the unsettlement of suddenly performing a meter and a half above ground. It’s just a lot to think about when the show has become almost instinctive, and suddenly that muscle memory is disrupted. I have to remind myself to expect this- when you have a cast as reliable as this one has been, I know it will be disconcerting to suddenly see something that’s been in excellent working order for more than a week suddenly go temporarily south.

And the reliability of the cast has indeed been astounding. Every show has its own developmental pacing, but it’s not unusual to get right up to opening night, still thinking it might not all come together in time. In your heart, you know that it probably will be okay, but the possibility that it won’t feels very real. This is definitely not that production, which is itself disconcerting. If you’d asked me two weeks ago, I might have said something very different, because everything still felt very fragmented. But all of a sudden it somehow just locked into place. Everything coalesced, and if I’m honest I can’t really say why. Of course there are little details we’re still working, but if the production had to go up tomorrow, I would feel that the cast was ready. Having everything come together so quickly, and so early, feels unnerving, like “what have I missed?” And yet it makes sense logically, because the cast for The War in Heaven has been unusually good at adapting, taking direction, and identifying and solving problems on their own. This is particularly remarkable because our role as a “Guild of Waifs and Strays” means that we weren’t turning anyone away, and we could easily have ended up with a much less talented group. 

One of the most challenging projects for this show has been putting together Lucifer’s costume. I don’t want to give away the details of what happens, but the costume has required quite a lot of design, re-design, re-design again, adjustment after adjustment. Costume making is something I usually do but it’s not something where my skills are especially high-level, so seeing the costume finally work out in rehearsal yesterday was a huge moment. Similarly, the hellmouth part of our set has not been easy to plan out, but yesterday it too suddenly worked out, through a couple of brilliantly elegant solutions from a colleague. That really has been the theme of this show: this coming together all of a sudden, going from chaos to completion with what I can only term astonishing abruptness, and well before I have anticipated. 

And yet there is still so much to do! Final details. Waggon rehearsals. Waggon crew. And in truth, none of it fully prepares you for doing the show in total, because moving through the streets and performing in these spaces is something we can’t actually rehearse. But of course it’s also that liveness that makes the mystery plays so special- all live theatre has an unpredictable quality, that’s part of its charm, it’s just amped up a few extra notches when you’re doing street theatre with waggons.

We’ve poured our hearts and souls into this project, and I’m so excited to be arriving at the point where we get to share the results with you. So if you happen to be in York next weekend, come by and see how it all turns out!

The Theological Labyrinth: Playing Lucifer

Posted on by under Drama, Musings, Mystery Plays, York Mystery Plays 2026

We’re deep in rehearsals, which is why this is going up rather late in the day!, and character questions inevitably arise. On this week’s #mysteryplaymonday, our play’s director looks at the challenges that face anyone playing Lucifer, who is first God’s chosen angel and then God’s great betrayer. What does one make of an angel who comes to spend eternity in hell? The answers aren’t easy to find…

Though the mystery plays are all biblical, it could be argued that they aren’t all equally theological. What I mean by that is that some plays are quite straightforward, and if you accept the central premise of the storyline, you don’t have to get too far into the weeds as far as theological debate is concerned. You can understand, for example, the Nativity story: Mary has a baby, shepherds and kings arrive to visit him, we are told that the baby is the son of (and also sort of himself) God. Whether or not one believes in it, in a faith sense, is immaterial; one also doesn’t have to parse the confusion of the Christian Trinity, or debate the virginity of Mary, to understand the story.

Other plays are almost entirely theological, and can be much harder to approach. I directed The Transfiguration in 2010 and I still can’t really explain “the transfiguration” as an event. I was ringing friends who’d been to seminary, asking them what on earth this whole thing even was, and they didn’t have particularly clear answers, much less anything that could be staged reasonably well. It’s in the plays because it holds theological weight, and while I’m sure it’s an attempt to explain the matter to the medieval audiences, I don’t think the text succeeds in clarifying anything! Imagine having an actor ask why they’re doing something in the play, and having, as director, to shrug and say, “Your guess is as good as mine.” Neither person will be very happy with that situation.

The War in Heaven is, as a story, fairly straightforward. But the play is actually, and unavoidably, about the question of where evil comes from. You can’t escape asking it, because any reasonable actor is going to be faced with character decisions that are entirely grounded in very unsettled, perpetually contested theological territory. Why does God favour one angel above the others? Why does he pick Lucifer, clearly the worst person for the job? Is Lucifer actually evil? God has literally just made him: did God plan for this capacity, or is it something Lucifer has come up with on his own… which would imply that he has his own ability to create, and therefore his boast that he is like God isn’t completely wrong! Does Lucifer have agency, or is his entire heaven-to-hell-trajectory something God planned all along? That will have significant implications for how an actor approaches the role! And what exactly is Lucifer’s role upon reaching hell? We traditionally think of him as ruler of hell, yet in our play his domination over the other fallen angels and demons is lacking.

Additionally, it’s very difficult to get one’s head around the idea that pride, even excessive pride, is the same as ultimate evil. Sure, he’s got a big head, and he’s leading some angels astray, but it’s not like Lucifer has killed anyone, or even truly intends harm towards anyone else. Even in hell, trying to deflect blame from himself, Lucifer is self-protective rather than aggressive.

In hell, we hit the question of whether Lucifer, Satan, and/or the devil are the same being. The names get thrown around at different times and in different places, functionally interchangeable in the colloquial mind, but the answers really matter to our play. If they are different entities, then Lucifer’s had quite a demotion, and in Hell he is presumably no more powerful than the other fallen angels- which makes their attack on him a very different fight than if he still has elevated powers! But if Lucifer is Satan and the devil, then ironically sending Lucifer to hell has essentially just given him what he wanted: a kingdom he can rule, and the power to do so. Lucifer has thus gained status, in functional terms if not in ethical ones, by arriving in hell, and that has to be played very differently. 

This is genuinely contested theological ground. God is supposed to be omniscient and omnipotent, and therefore logic suggests that he has to have created evil (or at least set the pieces in motion for it to exist); but the idea that God created evil, directly or indirectly, has never sat well with Christians, and so the devil legends give him a pass: evil is obviously someone else’s fault. But that makes God not all-powerful and all-knowing… you don’t have to dig very deeply to see that these contradictions have been hotly contested over the centuries, and no answer that has satisfied everyone (much less logic itself) has appeared. It doesn’t help that our play is pieced together from quite discrete lines in the bible, apocryphal texts, and tradition, rather than existing as a single, congruent, and cohesive narrative. In fact, Lucifer/Satan/the devil doesn’t have a particularly big role in the bible at all! (Nor is his role large in the wider mystery plays.) 

The actor playing Lucifer thus has the challenge that, at every conceivable moment, the stereotypical actor question, “what’s my motivation?”, ends in a long discussion about theology, and doesn’t really get answered. Every character-building question leads down this inevitable path, because “what are good and evil?” are simultaneously enormous, unanswerable questions, and also the foundational questions that define the character. We have to answer them, or at least make decisions about what, for the duration of the play, we want them to be.

What would our medieval Tanners have thought of Lucifer? Making sense of ordinary people’s beliefs is tricky, since they didn’t leave much record of their thoughts or ideas, and the medieval church found power in keeping itself somewhat mysterious (through means such as the Latin service that lay people couldn’t easily understand, and rood screens that kept churchgoers from clearly seeing what was happening at the altar), so their knowledge and sense of concepts like “evil” or “the devil” may barely have existed; if they did, we have no way of knowing if they made sense of them in an orthodox manner or not. No doubt some innately introspective Tanners might have pondered the contradictions in logic that are occasionally presented in our play, but we just can’t know what conclusions they might have draw, or with whom they might have discussed things.

What we do know is that, like other aspects of religion (see our earlier post on angels), questions about Lucifer and the devil had come in and out of vogue, and the interest in an apocalyptic battle between good and evil that is currently highly visible within Christianity due to the prominence of the Evangelical branches, has not always been so dominant. Hell scenes bookend the York mystery plays, with our play at the beginning and Doomsday at the end, but the vast majority of cycle focuses on Jesus’ life or the prefigurement thereof: the emphasis is not on how to avoid damnation, but rather on how to achieve salvation. In this sense, Lucifer stands as an object lesson in what not to do, rather that the epitome of all evil. Sitting beside all the deep theological and philosophical questions that our play poses is a phrase we’ve all heard: pride goes before a fall. This, perhaps more than all of the more complex questions, is what Lucifer needs to embody.

Behind the Scenes: Thousands of Feathers & Finger Painting

Posted on by under Design, Musings, York Mystery Plays 2026

For this week’s #MysteryPlaysMonday, “The War in Heaven”‘s designer talks about what’s going on with the costumes, and working with our brilliant crafting volunteers.

Do a Mystery Play, they said. It’ll be fun, they said. And truth be told, they were right! What they didn’t mention was the angel feathers… the thousands and thousands of angel feathers… the glitter… the marabou fluff… the shedding of a thousand fabrics… all of it trailing along after you, like some bizarre but fabulous slug trail. And that’s before we get to the paint. If this sounds like I’m complaining, I’m really not; it’s said with a smile. But there is no denying that making our costumes has been a messy process!

To be fair, we’re quite lucky. We had angels in our play in 2014 and we have angels in our play this year, and our angel costumes are in quite good shape, so we’re able to reuse them. I’m quite proud of our angel costumes- yeah, I’ve heard them referred to as the “chicken suits” but I stand by the many, many instances where medieval angels have feathered bodies. The trouble with the angel costumes isn’t the things themselves, it’s the fact that we simply don’t have enough of them. We have to make more. And that means: making lots of feathers.

There are many ways you can achieve feathers. Our angels’ large wings, beautifully crafted for York Theatre Royal, use foam and faux fur for their feathers. (We’re extremely pleased to have these wings on loan; they date from the 1992 production in the theatre, and thus connect our play today to a different strand of modern Mystery Plays history.) Our smaller wings are covered in actual bird feathers. Medieval angels likely had their costumes made our of leather and/or fabric. I decided that large-weave canvas was the ideal material, because I wanted something that would fray easily but wouldn’t do so in a stringy, tangled manner. Gold glitter-glue is used to give them some sparkle, but it serves a very functional purpose, making sure that the fraying of the edges of the feathers doesn’t extend to them falling apart. They look great at a distance (say, on a waggon!) but they’re quite tedious to make, especially the fraying part. In 2014 I lost all the feeling in my finger tips for about six months from fraying the costumes; this year I watched one of our volunteer costume makers use a seam ripper to do them quite efficiently and I was horrified that I hadn’t just done that! Sewing them on is no picnic, either, as one has a lapful of material with hundreds of feathers pinned on- which means hundreds of pins, ready to catch your legs, your arms, your hands, at any moment. It’s a bit like cuddling a porcupine.

Our fallen angels don’t get to look shiny and feathery- they’ve come through the fires of hell already, and they’re not pretty. A scour of York’s charity shops gave us the base pieces, and then the costume volunteers went to town! They literally tore the clothing apart, putting holes in the pieces, some of which were then patched with canvas mesh (saved from an old screen tent my family used to take camping- costuming is a lesson in never throwing things away!) or fabric painted to look bloody. We sewed on dangling strands of the same bloody material, while some pieces had the additions of chain or rope as well. All of them have some feathers, but they’re brown and black, “singed” from those hellfires. And then they all got painted: we set up a space where grown adults could pour paint on their hands and smash it all over the costumes. The painting experience was giving me flashbacks to early childhood: I could practically smell the finger paints my mum used to give me when I was a toddler. The results really worked: any shine on the fabric was dulled, and some of them really did look like the fallen angels had been through something- possibly a dung heap. If only we could figure out a way to make them smell the way they look….

Much of costuming, like theatre itself, is about trying things and seeing what works, but there are also times where experience lends knowledge that might be otherwise obscure. Simply mucking in with “finger paints” was a volunteer’s wise suggestion, and worked much better than using brushes. Another pearl from someone with excellent wardrobe credentials was to use coffee grounds for dirt on the costumes. As always, the volunteers bring their knowledge with them, and I learn things that are useful now and for the future. I also appreciate their willingness to get messy. Acting, of course, takes a certain amount of courage- but as someone who can’t stand having anything sticky or gritty on her hands, I think it takes some courage to wade into the messiness of costumes, as well! Not everyone enjoys this sort of thing, and I appreciate beyond measure the people who aren’t afraid to get messy with paint, or sit under a pile of pin-studded fabric, in order to achieve something fantastic. 

And I apologise to their families for sending them home trailing clouds of glitter. The Mystery Plays are for everyone… our angels’ glitter is, too.

Report from the Rehearsal Room

Posted on by under Drama, Musings, Mystery Plays, York Mystery Plays 2026

Welcome to another #MysteryPlayMonday! We’re well into rehearsals for “The War in Heaven”, so today the play’s director is sharing a bit of what we’re working on from behind the scenes.

By the time you see a performance, hopefully everything that happens feels, if not real, then at least natural. The conversation should feel real, not rehearsed; the movements should feel logical and organic, not choreographed. Obviously there are exceptions to this rule- actual choreography, dance, is clearly not spontaneous, despite what musical theatre might want you to believe!- but in the main, the performance should belie the many hours put in to make that happen.

And many hours there are! This week we had the whole cast in, and finally had a chance to really work on the blocking. For those who don’t do a lot of theatre, “blocking” means figuring out where everyone is going to stand, and when they’re going to move, and where, and why. It’s the choreography of everything that isn’t actually dance (or fights). Blocking can be as simple as telling a cast member “you stand there” to a far more complex series of movements involving dozens of people. In fact, in most cases, the more moving parts (people or motions) involved, the more tightly choreographed something is likely to be, to make sure that all of those many pieces sit comfortably together and look the way you want.

Many years ago, I worked with a director who had the entire show mapped out on paper, down to which direction she wanted the spoon to go when a character stirred her tea, and how many times it was to go around the cup. Although I applaud the thoroughness with which she had thought through the show, the experience was stifling for the actors, who had no ability to create the physical world for their own characters. The effect of that experience on me was that I like to go into rehearsals with some general notes about how I’d like things to look, and why, but it’s probably more loose than some people would prefer, as I want to give the cast maximum flexibility to contribute to the process (and to the solving of solutions when there’s a problem, because they should know what feels right for their version of their character better than I do!), and because I’m fully aware that what looks lovely inside my head may bump up against a physical reality that I haven’t anticipated, like just how many angels can dance on the bed of a waggon. 

Which is exactly what happened at “The War in Heaven” rehearsals this weekend. We have a fairly large cast, and only so much square footage The waggons seem big until you actually mark them out on the floor with tape, and then try to fit all your actors onto that rectangle. All of a sudden, things are very crowded. It’s “Mary, your foot is actually off the waggon!”, “Bob, your wing is poking someone in the face”, and the best laid plans just don’t… quite… work. So you change things, and change them again, and together with the cast you work through figuring out exactly how to bridge the gap between how you want things to look and how things can look. Our minds are awfully good at imagining that something is possible, even when it’s not, so you can’t be too hung up on everything going exactly the way it did in your head!

This can be either really challenging for a cast (“but I already learned it the other way!”), or satisfying (because their input is valued and they aren’t treated like a movable object), or both in turns. And sometimes working through a part means anyone not actively in that scene can spend quite a bit of time sitting on their hands. Our cast were really fantastic about being patient and walking through different solutions to the problem, which I thoroughly appreciate, and it’s my absolute belief that an end product that is the result of multiple people’s input is invariably better than what any one individual could come up with on their own.

The blocking is the physical manifestation of all the characters together interacting, but the acting itself is naturally a more individual matter, where each person has to find their own ideas about who they’re portraying and what makes them tick. We’ve been starting rehearsals by talking about and playing with the characters; I know “theatre games” have a reputation for being cheesy and unpleasant, but I’m not interested on some sort of “pretend you’re a toaster” nonsense, I want to see people really thinking themselves into their parts. One of the silly things we did last time was make our breakfast in character, and as nuts as that sounds, the results were great. God didn’t have to do anything- he could just make it appear. Lucifer had one of the fallen angels scrambling to make his eggs, rather than doing it himself. The fallen angels complained that their eggs cooked too fast, because hell is so hot, while at least one angel found that fire is a problem in heaven and so made porridge instead. Obviously the great Breakfast Scene is nowhere to be found in our play, but especially when working on amateur theatre, people understanding their world enough to make those choices- choices that technically go against the direction “cook some eggs” but are entirely character/situation appropriate!- is exactly the point of the exercise. 

These are just some of the pieces “in motion” as we get ready for the Mystery Plays. It’s a phenomenally complicated undertaking, and it’s a bit like Russian nesting dolls: the character work and the blocking are just two of the pieces which make up our play; there are nine other productions doing the same things, which together make up the whole; and at the top level there are all of the logistics, as well as making sure it all hangs together coherently. That’s not even to mention the festival events adjacent to the Plays (which you should definitely check out)! I hope by the time you see it all in performance that what you’ll see will be a seamless whole, an organism that lives and breathes as one entity… but know that it’s made of all the million little cells of people and work and ideas that we’re creating right now.

First Rehearsals! and the Questions They Bring Up

Posted on by under Drama, Musings, Mystery Plays, York Mystery Plays 2026

A report from the wilds of Mystery Plays! It’s #MysteryPlaysMonday and our director for “The War in Heaven” has finished the first in-person rehearsal with some of our cast….

When does a production begin? It’s not like sports, where there’s a buzzer or a whistle or a bell, something to tell you, “They’re off!” Maybe it’s the moment the first idea arrives in someone’s head, or the first meeting where two people planning it sit down to swop ideas. Is it the first creative team meeting? The first call for auditions? There are many metrics you could use to help define it, and in almost all cases the beginning isn’t really when the work starts- certainly, by the time the actors walk through the door the first time, scripts in hand, ready to rehearse, a hell of a lot of work has already gone happened.

But emotionally, the first rehearsal still feels like a starting point. I won’t say it’s true of all productions, but in most cases the performers are the centre of the event. There’s that old line about drama, that all it takes is two planks and a passion, but you don’t even really need the planks: the passionate people who make up a performance are what you can’t do without.

Our Mystery Plays journey with “The War in Heaven” thus began with our reading, online, with everyone involved, just to get a sense of the text and the characters, just to dip our toes in the water. Online wouldn’t normally be the ideal way to do things, but it made it possible for several people to be “there” who couldn’t have been otherwise, and ideally everyone is involved from the very beginning and given a chance to feel welcome and a part of things. The truth is that not all parts of the Mystery Plays are equally involved- waggon crew comes in quite near the end, for example, and costume or prop makers may toil behind the scenes and rarely get to spend time with the cast, and yet we absolutely could not do this project without them. There may be small parts, but there are no expendable parts; even the smallest role in terms of time and effort is crucial. That’s the upside to starting online and easily accessible, it gives more people a chance to start from the same place.

The down side is that it is inevitably less dynamic, and getting to a rehearsal room is… well, there’s just nothing else like it! As we finally got to do today, when our Heavenly cast arrived (we’ll get to meet our Hellish denizens next week). We started off by talking a bit about our characters, brainstorming some different questions to ask of them, so that our angels in particular can start seeing their characters as individual, rather than generic.

If the angels have to work to create unique personalities in relatively few lines, Lucifer is almost too well-known, because it’s hard for us to forget what we know about him: that he winds up as God’s greatest adversary. He can’t start out that way, though, he has to begin virtuous and holy, like his brethren. We have to start by liking Lucifer, as we might any other angel; while the pace of the play means that the rot sets in quickly, we have to remember that it wasn’t always there, and that’s difficult when, culturally, we have the baggage of foreknowledge. Lucifer therefore has to really seduce the audience- not in the “sexy daemon” trope that I know exists, that’s not the choice we’ve made in this case- but convince them against their knowledge that he’s a normal angel, until he isn’t.

God’s character is, I think, quite clear in the text, and obvious in who he needs to be. His challenge is more about theology. I don’t want our play to become about theology, for although the story is Biblical the goal is not to preach but simply to tell a story about some characters, but it’s hard to avoid some of those thorny questions in imagining God. Why doesn’t he smite Lucifer down the very second he gets out of hand? Why does God pick Lucifer in the first place? (“God made a bad call” was one  brilliantly blunt answer that came out of rehearsal today.) If God is all-seeing, all-knowing, how does he miss the obvious point that Lucifer is going to go off the rails? There’s no way to answer these questions for our  character, without also acknowledging that these are questions that scholarly theologians have struggled with for centuries. If they haven’t been able to agree upon the answers to our questions, we’re unlike to do so in the short course of our rehearsals! And yet answers which make sense within the context of our play have to be found.

I’m sure everyone had been thinking about these things, but they really surface at early rehearsals, because they can make a difference in material ways. One of the things we toyed with was the question of where God is, while Lucifer is growing in arrogance. Surely, if God is sitting right there, next to him, he might tap Lucifer on the shoulder with a swift, “Hey, knock it off! Too far!” But he doesn’t… so at least from the standpoint of visual narration, God can’t directly see what’s going on, or else his inaction makes no sense. So where is God? When does he leave, and where does he go? This is a real, physical issue we have to solve because the audience has to understand what’s going, but the core of the question- why does God let Lucifer fall?- is also a pretty deep matter of theology and faith.

All these questions are swirling around in my brain after our first rehearsal- and we’ve only worked on half the play! The Hell cast will be in next, which will make for an interesting contrast; Hell is less of a theological thicket and more of a pure staging challenge for us. But, as just shown, that’s what I’m saying now. I may have many different thoughts and questions about Hell and its inhabitants once they’ve leaped off of the page! And those questions are how I know: we’ve officially, really and truly, begun.

Farces, Finale

Posted on by under Farces, Musings

It’s our final #FarcesFriday because the event is this Saturday night! (You can still get tickets, or get them at the door!) So today our farces’ director sums up the experience of preparing for them.

It’s so hard to believe we’ve arrived at the time when the farces will be performed, and put to bed, at least for now. They’ve been quite a journey, from an idea just being thrown around, through an incredible amount of preparation, to tomorrow evening!

The farces started even more embryonic than most of our productions, because I had no real familiarity with either French medieval drama or comedy in general in a historic context. We knew we wanted to start moving outside of the English medieval niche, but not going too far: something with a small cast, at a small scale, seemed a good way to get back on the metaphorical horse. Going through my bookshelves and pulling one of Jody Enders’ volumes off the shelf, I realised what a treasure-trove existed in French farces, and they ticked all the boxes: small casts, short skits, comedy, and not a deity in sight. 

Once we had settled on farces in general, and chosen our pair in particular, the academic excavation began. I liked these plays, but what did we know about them that might change how we approached them? There’s an irony in there somewhere, because these are not deep, intellectual plays that require a heavy academic hand; they’re pieces of fun and fluff, largely, pure entertainment for its own sake.

And yet working on these plays, I have learned so much, which I have hopefully distilled into smaller bites to share with you in these weekly posts! French medieval theatre is so remarkably different from English, more than I would have expected. I have still not ascertained why there doesn’t seem to be any visible exchange across the Atlantic, at a time when the two countries were interacting quite a lot (albeit not necessarily very pleasantly), or why culturally the French valued humour, and secular humour at that, in a way that doesn’t quite seem to have been the case in England.

It was dismaying to read through many farces, only to discover how violent they were. Perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did- it was so prevalent that I rather struggled to find plays where that wasn’t a dominant feature. Violence often features in English plays, as well, but not so relentlessly. I think it’s still possible to perform those plays if they’re handled very delicately, but it isn’t something I personally wanted to do, so we moved on and kept digging to find the plays that we have, which are also, in my opinion, two of the best anyway. And that’s another thing worth noting about medieval French farces: with so many of them surviving, their quality is uneven, and not all of them are necessarily worth performing today. (Just because it’s old doesn’t always mean it’s good is sometimes a hard thing for a history lover to say! But it remains true.)

Women came off as poorly as you might expect from something written in the 14th century, and yet we have Guillemette, who accurately points out her husband Pierre Pathelin’s flaws, but who seems to have a marriage largely based on mutual aims and a degree of respect. Jacquinot and Jacquinette, our Washtub couple, could learn some lessons from them. And it could be argued that for them, as well as marriages in other farces, nobody comes out ahead- the women may be stereotyped as cranky nags or adulteresses, but the men are often stereotyped as lumpen idiots, who deserve what they get. It’s a negative egalitarianism, but it’s arguably present.

Indeed, one of the hallmarks of the farces writ large is that very nearly everyone is a bit scandalous- the moral universe of the farces is indeed a perverse one, where everyone is cheating, failing, or flailing. True success and decency just don’t exist here; moral ambiguity is as good as it gets. But perhaps that’s one of the attractive things about them: even as stereotypical, stock characters, the better among the farces know that their characters can’t simply be hateful or saintly, we have to sympathise with their plights even when they handle them badly, because they’re only funny if there is just enough humanity in them to be recognisable. In its way, this comes closer to modern characters, with motivations and nuances, than some of the more reverent religious dramas.

One of things we haven’t learned yet, but hope to this weekend, is how well they stand up as text. Many of the farces really do need a lot of zany, antic staging to make sense. We suspect, and hope, that the two we’ve chosen have enough narrative heft within the dialogue to prove entertaining. I don’t think you need to lard lots of extra sight gags on to them, and in fact I think you may detract from the core of these plays and their characters if you go overboard on staging jokes. We’ll see if this is the right approach or not when we get the plays in the mouths of actors this weekend!

I’m so excited to see what people will do with these wonderful characters! They may not be as deeply written a something out of a modern drama, but they’re fun and they’re funny and they’re sympathetic in their own strange way. While I don’t believe that all stories or characters need to be “relatable” there is something quite charming about realising that some things don’t change. Spouses still bicker over petty things like laundry. Lawyers still have shady reputations- maybe sometimes with good reason! People still try to see what they can get away with on a regular basis, flattery can still be pretty successful in running a scheme and a cheat, in-laws can still stick their noses in and make things awkward. All of this could have been written last week and have been just as amusing.

I’ll miss the farces. I won’t miss wrestling through my limited, struggling French… but I can read a lot more of it than I could a year ago! I’ll miss working on plays that make me laugh more than, despite evidence to the contrary, they make me think. They have been a bit of a vacation into a celebration of laughter and the ridiculous, which is not a place where I spent much time, and it’s been a breath of fresh air. Maybe someday we’ll come back and revisit a more fully staged version, but until that happens, it is indeed a bit sad to say au revoir to the Pathelins and the Jacquinots. But I want to bring this in with a smile… so I think I’ll go read the plays again once more. Then I’ll be sure to end this with a laugh.

An Assembly of Angels

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Musings, Mystery Plays, York Mystery Plays 2026

Continuing last week’s #MysteryPlayMonday theme of heavenly beings, this week our play’s director looks at the angels in “The War in Heaven”.

What is an angel?

I suspect most people have some quick answer on this one. A basic concept of something like an angel, even if it doesn’t go by that name, exists fairly cross-culturally, and you’d be especially hard-pressed in the Western world for “angels” as an idea to have escaped your notice. Yet when I thought about it, I realised that I had a couple conflicting answers within my own sphere of reference. Angels are, in general, God’s messengers, the intermediaries who communicate with humans on his behalf. Some may serve a guardian function, and some are reputed to escort the recently deceased into heaven. These angels, therefore, are a part of heaven that is and always has been supernatural. Contradictorily, however, the idea that people become angels upon their death is also in circulation, something children are told as a way of helping them make sense of their early experiences of personal loss. And then, to compound matters, some angels seem to get mixed up with saints.

Though the modern world is not immune to the lure of angels as a phenomenon, they rarely come in for the sort of in-depth study that was in vogue among theological circles in the Middle Ages, hitting a high point in the thirteenth century. “Angelology” was considered a genuine branch of science, a rigorous, academic study of the beings who are God’s attendants and helpers, and those who studied them went incredibly in depth in trying to make sense of what angels were and were not. 

Although there was much debate about it, for our purposes, angels are embodied beings, complete with wings (the evolution of angels, their wings, and ideas about what they look like could be an entire separate essay!). At the time-out-of-time of our play, they are only future emissaries to humanity, because humanity does not yet exist; for the same reason, they cannot be the heavenly incarnations of the earthly deceased. Our angels have two clear functions: they are to be companions for God, and to worship him.

This is, presumably, in addition to any specialised duties they might possess, for the same theologians who argued for or against angels possessing corporeal bodies also devised a system for organising varying species, if you will, of angelic beings. The Bible mentions ‘angels’ and ‘archangels’, ‘cherubim’ and ‘seraphim’ in both testaments; these are clearly angels that are different from one another in some way. Colossians 1:16 may add to their ranks: “For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers…” I confess that I struggle to see this as a listing of further supernatural beings and fail to see why this can’t reference earthly things (read in place of those words: ‘whether they be governments, or kingdoms, or states, or rulers’ to understand what I’m getting at), but medieval angelologists read that passage as listing more angelic types. And thus was born the Nine Order of Angels, a hierarchy of heavenly beings who served distinct functions for God. That seraphim and cherubim were in the “top tier” of this, while archangels and angels were at the bottom, is the one thing theologians more or less agreed on; the rest- thrones, powers, dominions, principalities, and virtues (the last of which seems to have been added outside of Biblical precedent, perhaps simply to make up the number nine)- are ranked differently by different theologians, in the middle. Most of them are depicted as feathered and winged human forms, but Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones (usually the highest trio) look least like humans, possessing multiple wings, faces, and hands. 

There are two implications for all of this with regard to our play. The first is that our angels do not need to- in fact, probably shouldn’t- be identical. We can represent different types of angels, including angels that don’t appear as humans. The second is that our angels can be not only distinct physically, we can look at the script and see how it might suggest different characters. This latter is especially important for actors, but also uniquely challenging: how can you be an individual when, by definition, you exist with the purpose of “praising God”? I would argue that it’s in how you choose to read the script, and what subtleties you can create out of it. One angel seems to praise God for the beauties and blessings of heaven, while another finds their own angelic existence awe-inspiring. A third simply feels grateful to be proximate to the deity. These are different focuses and can suggest different personalities. And let us not forget the fourth angel, at the start of the play: Lucifer begins as an angel (some angelic hierarchies consider him a tenth type; others suggest that he was either a cherub or a seraph), so there must be something different about him which makes him vulnerable to his own ego, while the angels who follow him must also possess, or be lacking, some essential quality that leads to their downfall.

In addition to their relationship with God, we may consider how the angels relate to one another, in trying to make sense of them as personalities. The good angels must be bewildered by the abandonment of their brethren, an abandonment which takes place both in presence and in ideology. If you are an angel whose greatest character note is “grateful to be near God”, how would you feel about a sibling angel who deliberately chose to turn away from God and worship someone else? Does heaven feel strangely empty without the angels who have fallen? What does the fact of their fall mean for you own angelic capacity to fail? Sorrow, anger, confusion… these are emotional options for the post-fall angels that actors can pick up and run with. I don’t buy these angels as mindless drones who can only praise God and nothing else; if that were the case, either the fall itself would be impossible (which it clearly isn’t) or it would be meaningless, for if the angels have no choice there is no virtue in their decision to follow God rather than Lucifer. The question of angelic free will is another favourite among those who study them and their biblical precedents, but in our play I think it has to be read as present.

For our angels, the answer to “what’s my motivation” may start with “to paise God”, but it doesn’t end there. And that’s what makes “The War in Heaven” a little bit different, and hopefully for those actors a whole lot more fun.

A Farce Bibliography, Part 2

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Farces, French Farces, Musings

Continuing from our last #FridayFarces, here is the second installation of our farce director’s lengthy reading list!

If last week wasn’t enough book list for you, here is the second half, which includes most, though possibly not all, of the editions which I consulted in trying to carve out our translation. I don’t assume you’d want to read all of these, or possibly any, but I have once again put asterisks by those books that were especially helpful in getting my head around this project, and at the bottom you’ll find a list of editions that were consulted in preparing our translation. I sincerely hope that our plays will have a similar effect on you that they did on us: a kindling of curiosity, a window that beckons towards you and whispers, “I want to know more about this.”

Jacob, P.L. Recueil de Farces, Soties et Moralites du Quinzieme Siecle. (1859) Adolphe Delahays: Paris.

** Knight, Alan E. Aspects of Genre in the Late Medieval French Drama. (1983) Manchester University Press: Manchester. 

Knight, Alan E. “The Condemnation of Pleasure in Late Medieval French Morality Plays”, The French Review, Vol. 57 No. 1 (1983), pp. 1-9.

Knight, Alan E. “The Medieval Theatre of the Absurd”, PMLA, Vol. 86, No. 2 (1971), pp. 183-189.

Koopmans, Jelle & Darwin Smith. “Un Théâtre ‘Français’ du Moyen Âge?”, Mèdièvales, No. 59 (2010), pp. 5-16.

Koopmans, Jelle. “La farce, genre noble aux prises avec la facètie?”, Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes, Vol. 32 (2016), pp. 147-163.

Kramer, Femke. “How to Deal With Farces?” Medieval English Theatre, Vol. 21 (1999), pp. 66-78.

Langle, Paul Fleuriot de. Les sources du comique dan “Maître pathelin”. (1926), Librairie du Roi René: Angers, France.

Lejeune, Rita. “Pour Quel Public ‘La Farce de Maistre Pierre Pathelin’ A-T-Elle Été Rédigée?”, Romania Vol. 82 No. 328 (1961), pp. 482-521.

Lemercier, P. “Les Éléments Juridiques de ‘Pathelin’ et la Localisation de l’oeuvre”, Romania vol. 73 No. 290 (2) (1952), pp. 200-226.

Lewicka, H. “Pour la Localisation de la Farce de M e Pathelin”, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, T. 24 No. 2 (1962), pp. 273-281.

Maddox, Donald. “The Morphology of Mischief in ‘Maistre Pierre Pathelin'”, L’Esprit Créateur, Vol. 18 No. 3 (1978), pp. 55-68.

Maddox, Donald. The Semiotics of Deceit: the Pathelin Era. (1984) Associated University Presses: Lewisburg, PA and London.

Manzour, Charles. “Vingt ans de recherches sur le théâtre du xvie siècle: deuxième partie: le théâtre comique, les genres nouveaux, les spectacles de cour, le théâtre scolaire”, Nouvelle Revue du XVIe Siécle, Vol. 17 No. 2 (1999), pp. 301-318.

Maskett, David. “The Aesthetics of Farce: ‘La Jalousie du Barbouillé”, The Modern Language review, Vol. 29 No. 3 (1997), pp. 581-589.

Meyerhold, Vsevolod & Nora Beeson. “Farce”, The Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 4 No. 1 (1959), pp. 139-149.

Nitzie, William A. & Preston Dargan. A History of French Literature. (1938) Holt, Rinehart & Winston: New York.

Norland, Howard B. “Formalizing English Farce: Johan Johan & Its French Connection”, Comparative Drama (1983), pp. 141-152.

Oliver, Thomas Edward. “Some Analogues of Maistre Pierre Pathelin”, The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 22 No. 86 (1909), pp. 395-430.

Peters, Edward et al. “A Feast of Law: A Symposium on the Teaching of Medieval Legal History”, The History Teacher, Vol. 22 No. 1 (1988), pp. 7-31.

Philipot, Emmanuel. “Remarques et Conjectures sur le Texte de ‘Maistre Pierre Pathelin'”, Romania, Vol. 56 No. 224 (1930), pp. 558-584.

Picot, Émile. Recueil Général des Sotties (3 vols.). (1968) Librairie de Firmin Didot et Cie: Paris.

Pinet, Christopher. “French Farce: Printing, Dissemination and Readership from 1500-1560”, Renaissance and Reformation, Vol. 3 No. 2 (1979), pp. 111-132.

Redmond, James, ed. Farce. (1988) Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Roques, Mario. “Notes sur ‘Maistre Pierre Pathelin’: I: Manger de l’Oie”, Romania, Vol. 57 No. 228 (1931), pp. 548-560.

Roy, Bruno. “Quand les Pathelin Achètent du Drap”, Médiévales, No. 29 (1995), pp. 9-22.

Schaumburg, K., et al. La Farce de Patelin et Ses Imitations. (1889) C. Klincksieck: Paris.

Schoell, Konrad. “Humour in Farce, Sotie and Fastnachtspiel“, European Medieval Drama, No. 4 (2000), pp. 9-22.

Schreiber, Cècile. “L’Univers compartimenté du théâtre médiéval”, The French Review, Vol. 41 No. 4 (1968), pp. 468-478.

Schumacher, Joseph. Studien Zur Farce Pathelin. (1911) C. Hinstorff: Rostock, Germany.

Segre, Cesare & John Meddemmen. “Maistre Pathelin: Manipulation of Topics and Epistemic Lability”, Poetics Today, Vol. 5 No. 3 (1984), pp. 563-583.

Small, Graeme. Late Medieval France. (2009) Palgrave Macmillan: New York.

Smith, Darwin. “About French Vernacular Traditions: Medieval Roots of Modern Theatre Practices”, Journal of Early Modern Studies, No. 8 (2019), pp. 33-67.

Smith, Darwin. Maistre Pierre Pathelin: Le Miroir d’Orgueil. (2002) Tarabuste: Saint-Benoit-du-Sault.

Stephenson, Robert C. “Farce as Method”, The Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 5 No. 2 (1960), pp. 85-93.

Symes, Carol. “The Appearance of Early Vernacular Plays: Forms, Functions, and the Future of Medieval Theatre”, Speculum Vol. 77 No. 3 (2002), pp. 778-831.

Urwin, Kenneth. “Pathelin ‘Pendable'”, The Modern Language Review, Vol. 42 No. 3 (1947), pp. 359-361.

Watkins, John H. “The Date of the ‘Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles'”, The Modern Language Review, Vol. 37, No. 4 (1942), pp. 485-487.

EDITIONS

Allen, John. Three Medieval Plays. (1953) Heinemann Educational Books: London.

Bowen, Barbara C. Four Farces. (1967) Basil Blackwell: Oxford.

Champion, Richard T. Maistre Pierre Pathelin. (1970) Librairie Honore Champion: Paris.

Coustelier, Antoine Urbain. La farce de maistre Pierre Pathelin. (1723) Antoine-Urbain Coustelier: Paris.

Dondo, Mathurin. Pathelin et Autres Pièces. (1924) D.C. Heath & Company: Boston.

Dufournet, Jean. La Farce de Maître Pierre. (1986) Flammarion: Paris.

Eliot, Samuel A. (ed.). Little Theatre Classics, Vol. 2. (1920) Little, Brown & Company: Boston.

Enders, Jody. Trial by Farce. (2023) University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor.

Faivre, Bernard. Les Farces Moyen Age et Renaissance, Vol. 1. (1997) Imprimerie Nationale: [unknown].

Fournier, Edouard. La Vraie Farce de Matire Pathelin. (1881) E. Dentu: Paris.

Frappier, Jean & A.M. Gossart. Le Theatre Comique au Moyen Age. (1935) Larousse: Paris.

Gassies, G. Anthologie du Théatre Français du Moyen Age. (1925) Librairie Delagrave: Paris.

Hankiss, János. Farce Nouvelle. (1925) JHE Heitz, GE Stechert & Co.: New York.

Harden, A. Robert. Trois Pièces Médiévales. (1967) Meredith Publishing Co.: New York.

Holbrook, Richard T. Master Pierre Pathelin. (1914) Walter H. Baker & Co: Boston.

Holbrook, Richard. The Farce of Master Pierre Patelin. (1905) Riverside Press: Cambridge, MA.

Jacob, P.L. La Farce de Maitre Pathelin. (1876) Librairie des Bibliophiles: Paris.

Jagendorf, Moritz. The Farce of the Worthy Master Pierre Patelin. (1949) Walter H. Baker Co.: Boston, MA. 

Jodogne, Omer. Maître Pierre Pathelin. (1983) Peeters: Louvain, Belgium.

Leteissier, Anne. La Farce de Maître Pierre Pathelin. (2001) Magnard: Paris.

Malaunoy, Marion de. Maistre Pierre Pathelin: Hystorie, Reproduction en Fac-smile. (1904) Librairie de Firmin Didot Etc.: Paris.

Marin, Fanny. La Farce de Maître Pathelin. (2000) Hachette Livre: Paris.

Pickford, C.E. La Farce de Maistre Pierre Pathelin. (1967) Bordas: Paris.

Picot, Guillaume. La Farce de Maistre Pathelin. (1972) Librairie Larousse: Paris.

Relonde, Maurice. The Farce of the Worthy Master Pierre Patelin, the Lawyer. (1917) R.G. Badger: Boston.

Robert-Busquet, L. Farces du Moyen Age. (1942) Lanore: Paris.

Snook, Lee Owen. The Fourth Yearbook of Short Plays. (1938) Row, Peterson & Co.: Evanston, IL.

Tissier, André. Farces du Moyen Age. (1984) Flammarion: Paris.

Unknown. The Village Lawyer. (1809) D. Longworth: New York. 

On Being God

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Musings, Mystery Plays, York Mystery Plays 2026

As we get started with our rehearsals and our cast, we’ll be sharing some of our thoughts on who the characters in our play are. This #MysteryPlayMonday, we’re kicking this off with reflections on God- what makes ours unique, and what challenges the part offers for an actor, medieval or modern.

Playing God, in the dramatic sense, must always have come with challenges, maybe even more so in the Middle Ages when acting wasn’t a profession in the way we know it, and faith and religion were so woven into the fabric of everyday life that they almost didn’t exist as separate concepts. If you were a medieval tanner playing God, for one day in the middle of the British summer, what did that mean?

Well, what does it mean today? 

The theological implications of that question aren’t actually more readily apparent today than they are from six hundred years ago; the very concept of a deity will vary from person to person (and possibly from moment to moment within the same person!), and I suspect to at least a degree that was true even back then. The character of God, in a religious sense, even varies within the Biblical source text: the dichotomy between the vengeful, often condemnatory God of the Old Testament versus the “love thy neighbour” doctrines preached in the New, and that frustrating issue of making sense of a trinitarian God who is both the same entity as Jesus, and separate.

But the God of the Mystery Plays, or rather the Gods in them, can be pinned down somewhat more readily because we can simply choose to read them as characters in a script, without the bigger implications coming into the conversation. It’s unlikely that medieval guildsmen would have taken this approach But for us, it’s far more useful. And because each group presents its own play, in somewhat atomised circumstances (we don’t get together to agree on using identical costumes, for example) we can see the Gods who appear in different plays as different versions, as well. 

Medieval drama can be difficult for modern actors, used to looking for more rounded characters who have imagined histories and subtexts; medieval plays weren’t written that way, their characters are designed to fulfil a “type” rather than be seen as specific individuals. But the God in “The War in Heaven” is one of the more complex iterations of the deity. He begins by way of introduction: “I am gracious and great… /All might is in me…/ I am life, the way unto wealth winning/ I am foremost and first. As I bid, shall it be.” This may, in the story, be entirely true, but it’s not exactly humble. God doesn’t need to be humble, of course, simply by virtue of being God. But as the play moves on, we have Lucifer saying, “All wealth do I wield. So wise is my wit.” These… aren’t terribly different words from God’s. And yet Lucifer can’t be holy and God can’t be arrogant. What makes them different, for a viewer, beyond “God is right because he’s God, Lucifer is wrong because he’s Lucifer”? To say that the audience has to like God feels absurd, because the idea that “God = good” and “good = something I should like, maybe without question” is so baked in to our culture. But from a theatrical standpoint, we can’t ever assume that audiences will just do something, we have to give them a reason and make our case for it, dramatically. Our audiences have to like God enough to empathise with him.

One thing which sets apart God from Lucifer is that God is a creator. He’s making Heaven, creating a world and the beings in it, contributing. Lucifer isn’t; all he does is boast. He may say that “above all shall I be building” but he doesn’t actually do it (and presumably he can’t). Put another way, God’s putting his money where his mouth is; he can back up his words. Lucifer has nothing to put behind his bragging. To quote from the musical Rent, “the opposite of war isn’t peace, it’s creation”: Lucifer simply isn’t adding anything to the sum total of the world, and that automatically makes God’s claims to being “foremost and first”, borne out through his actions, superior.

God’s reaction after Lucifer’s fall (our play does not show him explicitly “cast down to hell” by God) can be read several ways, giving actors lots of choices to make. Is he angry, or sorrowful? Does he feel betrayed, or disappointed? How do Lucifer’s choices make him view what he has created- is everything now marred by what has happened, because Paradise was not, in fact, perfect? Are we looking at an Old Testament God of fury and punishment, or a New Testament deity who actually wants to be forgiving, if Lucifer would only humble himself enough to ask? Maybe it’s a mixture of some or all of these!

I personally think the simple fact that these choices are available at all suggests that, rather than a majestic, magisterial God On High, the God of “The War in Heaven” is quite a human God, capable and willing to have complex emotional responses to events and to himself. And that’s what helps the audience see that, even in moments when his words may seem similar to Lucifer’s, God’s are reaching out, to them, the mortals watching the play, effectively saying ‘I am creating all of this for you’. This is not the wildly white-maned, aged, authoritative deity of, say, the Sistine Chapel painting. This God is, subtly, a reminder that in Christian theology he is also the same entity as Jesus; the seeds of his incarnation in mortality are planted from the very beginning, from within himself.

Unless a miraculous personal diary surfaces someday, telling us about the inner thoughts of a medieval tanner in York who held this role, we will never know if he might have thought about any of this, and given the distance in theology from a pre-Reformation world to ours, it seems unlikely. But medieval Catholicism did encourage people to think on the humanity of Jesus and his followers, rather than viewing them as almost too holy to have been real. (We probably wouldn’t have the Mystery Plays if a more Victorian touch-me-not religion had been dominant at the time!) So it’s not so difficult, really, to imagine a tanner, faced with the daunting task of playing God one warm summer day, contemplating how he’d feel in God’s place. After all, for that one Corpus Christi Day, on the waggon, God’s place was, for a moment, his.