Category Archives: Musings

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.

On the Joys of Auditions

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

After a busy week of auditions, it’s #MysteryPlayMonday! Our show’s director looks back on what made this such an enjoyable process.

It was auditions week here at HIDden, a time of equal parts stress and delight. This week, it’s been more the delight than the stress.

I’ve written previously about the fact that auditions are one of my least favourite parts of directing, because it’s such an imperfect process, but one where a casting mistake can lead to real problems for a production, not to mention distress to all involved. But auditions can also be really brilliant, and I thought today would be a good chance to talk about what’s been so amazing about them.

First of all, new people! Despite being a very shy person by nature, I actually really love getting to know new people, and actors are some of the most delightful folks in the world. They bring such diverse backgrounds and interests to a project, gifts which shape a production in large and small ways that you can’t imagine until they’re there in front of you. No two people will approach a character in the same way. Actors’ interests tend to be wide-ranging, maybe because you never know what aspect you’ll need to portray a character somewhere down the road; this also tends to make them natural psychologists or sociologists, interested in people and their quirks, the way their minds work, the way that small and large decisions can impact a character. That makes them fascinating people to talk to, and I come away from auditions feeling unusually positive about humanity in general, that if everyone is like the actors I’ve spent the week meeting, then people are more intelligent and insightful than I generally admit. 

I learn from them in a way that can change the shape of how I see the characters and the play. I’m not saying even the most brilliant audition would make me radically overturn the basic concept of the show, but in almost every individual audition, there was a moment where a lightbulb went off in my head. Maybe it was “oh, that line, that emphasis really gives God an extra nuance that’s fascinating!” or a particular small gesture that makes a demon seem particularly creepy and menacing that would be worth incorporating into their choreography. Not all ideas will make it into the final production, and not all interpretations will fit into the overall vision for the play, but the ideas that come to the table get considered and played with and that process refines it as a whole. My auditions notes have lots of scribbling in the margins about ideas that have been generated by the way audition pieces were presented.

The actors are the engine that drives the play in a very literal sense, but this is also true in a more subtle way. Actors at auditions give the process an injection of enthusiasm and excitement. This is even more pronounced with something like the Mystery Plays, which is a passion project for everyone involved. With all that goes on behind the scenes from a production end, it’s easy to get exhausted- endless rounds of design and re-design, meeting after meeting after meeting, hiring things and sourcing material and filling out paperwork and policy and and and… Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy 99% of the whole theatrical process, but even what you love can be exhausting. Meeting the actors in auditions is like a delightful caffeine injection, a much-needed influx of pure joy, and a reminder of how fortunate we are to be involved in a production that is almost entirely unique in the world. 

Enthusiasm and delight are emotional factors that auditions reintroduce at a much-needed juncture, but there is also an intellectual component to this. They appreciate the historicity of the Mystery Plays just as much as we do, and that in turn reminds me: this is their moment of immortality, of being a part of a tradition that started more than six hundred years ago. I owe it to them to give them the best circumstances for performing, to help them creature a performance worthy of that place in history. I often ponder- many of them will have heard me pose the question- what people will write about ourmystery plays in five hundred years, just the way I spend time thinking about the experience for our fifteenth-century forebearers. (“They won’t be able to say much, everything will have been digital and lost,” is a response I hear quite often, which is a conversation my friends in academia often entertain as well.) I am never unaware that we are, as the title of Margaret Rogerson’s book about the modern York plays says, “playing a part in history”, but at auditions I become extra conscious that what I owe to history comes through the actors, so those actors need the very best work that I can give, so that they in turn can do theirs.

In writing this and reflecting on the week, and what comes next, I realise that it’s not actually auditions I dislike at all, it’s casting. Making decisions about who will play what, knowing that I have more good people than big roles, and that some people will inevitably not get the part they would have preferred. That’s the part that’s stressful, both because it doesn’t feel great to disappoint anyone, and because it’s where mistakes are costly. But the auditions themselves? They were pretty damn fun! And now we have a whole team of new people to get to know, work with, and share in the process of creating something exciting for our contribution to the history of York. Yeah, that’s a pretty good week in the office, by any measure.

Pathelin on the Web

Posted on by under Drama, Farces, Historic, Musings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pathelin: The Franchise?

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Farces, Musings

Are sequels ever as good as the original? Even medieval people kept hoping so! Today’s #FarcesFriday explores the two sequels to Pierre Pathelin and what they tell us about humanity’s insatiable desire to see more of characters they love.

“But is it as good as the original?” That expression, heard every time a new film in a series, or a remake of some older property, comes out, is so familiar as to be a cliche. But it’s a fair question to ask. When an original work is so brilliant, its characters or world so compelling, that people want more of it, they invest in their own ideas of what that next chapter should be. Sometimes it lives up to their hopes; often it feels more like someone is cashing in on their affection for the material without understanding or honoring it. It’s easy for series, sequels, prequels, “origin storys”, remakes, and “reimaginings” to feel so divorced from made you fall in love with the first story that it’s almost unrecognisable. You can only wring so much out of a concept before it becomes something else that you may not love as much.

It feels like a very modern complaint- one I would cite as the reason I never go to the cinema, for example. But let us be fair. Plays get revived constantly. You could spend a lifetime just watching new iterations of Shakespeare and probably die without seeing them all. We, the theatre-folk, aren’t really above artistic recycling. And not only are we not, we also weren’t. Medieval people did it too. Now, we may recognise that Dante was writing Book of Revelation fan-fic, but we probably don’t think medieval plays did that. And yet, Master Pierre Pathelin would beg to disagree. Along with the brilliant original, two other plays survive in which he is one of the central characters. And the Pathelin canon, if one can call it that, doesn’t seem so very different from the modern tendency to wring as much material as one can out of a character that people dearly loved.

The New Pathelin is in parts a moderately close copycat to the “Old” Master Pierre Pathelin. Instead of trying to cheat a cloth merchant out of a bolt of fabric, he’s fleecing the furrier out of his furs, and doing so in exactly the same way: be convincing him of family familiarity that doesn’t actually exist, praising him and his later father to the skies, until the furrier trusts the wily Pathelin more than he should. Pathelin convinces him that he is actually buying the furs for the village priest, who will be responsible for handing over the money to pay for them. Upon arriving at the church, Pathelin then explains to the priest that the furrier has come to take confession, while the furrier thinks he is there to collect payment. Pathelin plays them off one another, sneaks away with his stolen furs, and it is the priest and the furrier to whom the final scene belongs. 

Guillemette is missing- although Pathelin directly reference his swindles of Guillaume Joceaulme, he doesn’t dwell upon his wife- which is shame because their partnership in deception is one of the delightful aspects of the original farce. More importantly from a dramatic standpoint, the brilliant reverse of fortune which is heaped upon Pathelin at the close of the original play, the method of which is one of the glories of its humour, is entirely gone. The priest and the furrier aren’t unfunny, it’s just that the depth of cleverness in crafting the scene isn’t there, and because so much of the opening scene hews so closely to the earlier script, the humour doesn’t feel as fresh. 

The Testament of Pathelin departs from the framework of the previous two plays. Not everyone even considers it a farce: all the way back in 1882, P.L. Jacob, who published the three plays together, considered it a “moral epilogue”, and “a framework imagined to bring out Pathelin’s character and to gather a host of witty remarks, popular proverbs, and foolishness.” The essence of the story is that Pathelin realises he is very near the end of his life, and he needs both an apothecary and a priest. His wife Guillemette is back, and willing to go find them. But there isn’t much the apothecary can do, so the priest instead gets a chance to argue that Pathelin should make his final confession as well as making his will. Pathelin’s joking bequests make the priest think he is delirious; unlike the original Pathelin play, this isn’t deliberate deception, it’s just Pathelin having a facetious list of bequests, and we can either infer that he means them sincerely, even if they are silly, or that he’s just enjoying one last burst of witticism. And then, his affairs complete, Pathelin dies. The play ends with expressions of faith by his wife, the apothecary, and the priest as they stand around him. 

You can’t exactly call it a morality play, but it’s hard to call it a true farce. The unavoidable undercurrent of mortality undercuts what thin humour it possesses. And its humour is one-line moments, rather than a story about a uniquely clever villain-hero. In truth, the main character of the story doesn’t really need to be Pathelin; any slightly unserious man might conceivably end his life on the same note. (If his imminent death had itself been a scheme, that might have been more comically successful, but it would have deprived the writer of its serious, religious finale.)

Though Jacob, for one, seems uncertain of which is the better of these two “continuation” plays, my person opinion is that New beats out Testament (and neither one competes with the original). Its first scene is just too close to the original to be funny a second time, and the priest/furrier scene suffers because it leaves Pathelin behind as a character- presumably audience fondness for that specific character is why there was demand for a second play at all. By the time of Testament, the distance in time and separation from the brilliance of the first writer mean that you kind of wonder why anyone even tried. So many of the things that I would criticise about a modern sequel are present all the way back in the second half of the fifteenth century.

What intrigues me, though, in terms of the sequel/franchise problem of overusing material, no matter how solid its origins, is an almost throwaway line by Jacob in his edition of the three plays: that there were at one time not merely two sequels but “a great number of farces in which the character of Pathelin… appeared” [italics mine]. I don’t know what evidence he had to assert this, but it’s a fascinating question: was there once what amounts to a Pathelin series? Were those plays just copies- medieval drama fan fiction? (In a pre-copyright society this doesn’t seem completely absurd.) It feels safe to assume that they would not be the product of the same author- there is no suggestion that the two known sequels share an author, either with one another or with the first Pathelin play- and so how closely they might have stayed to his particular authorial voice, or his concept of Pathelin as a character, can’t be known. Were the plays connected at all? In both New Pathelin and Testament, Pathelin references his cheating of Guillaume the clothier directly, tying the plays to their source material. But neither play uses the comic value unique to Pathelin’s (claimed) calling as a lawyer, and that lack of reference does change him from being a very specific type of swindler (with a societal commentary about lawyers inherently attached) to a more garden-variety rogue. Did any of the lost plays, if indeed they did exist, hew more closely to the character as we first meet him?

Without that information, it’s hard to say whether we can consider the idea that “Pathelin: the Series!” actually existed in the sense that we’d know it, as opposed to being closer to an internet fan page where enthusiastic writers with no technical connection to the material nonetheless feel comfortable riffing on the the source material. But the fact that we have three surviving plays that make use of the character Pierre Pathelin does show us how beloved the first play, and its scheming lead character, were by medieval French audiences. Perhaps that is an immutable human characteristic, unchanged across the centuries: we love certain characters too much to leave them alone, even if perhaps we’d be better off simply being satisfied with what their original creator offered us, and not trying to make their lightnight strike twice. 

Director’s Notes: Lost and Found in Translation

Posted on by under French Farces, Musings, Uncategorized

For this week’s #FarcesFriday, our director discusses the process she used to turn medieval French scripts into modern English, and how language takes a role in one of our plays.

            Let me begin with an admission: I don’t speak French. (At least, not yet!) My lack of multilingualism is one of the things in my life that I deeply regret, and I have Opinions about the lack of languages in early education in America that contributed to this. The reason I’m leading with this information is that tackling medieval French farces comes with some extra challenges, and that a knowledge of language- or lack thereof- actually plays an important part in Master Pierre Pathelin. 

            My first order of business was to round up as many iterations of Pathelin and The Washtub as I could- in modern English, in modern and medieval French, in clear cases where the words “inspired by” could be appended to what were very loose adaptations, even in one case a manuscript facsimile that I couldn’t possibly read. The point was to get a sense of what seemed essential to the text, and what approaches other people had taken (if, for example, it was clear just from comparing structures and lineation that entire chunks had been excised for a particular edition, that was information worth having, especially because, as you’ll see, I would also cut certain parts from the “original” for our script). It also gave a sense of the evolution of how the plays were received: the early twentieth century, for example, invariably “cleans up” anything deemed offensive, while more recent iterations take a more warts-and-all approach that prioritises the historicity of the piece.

            Then I fed every non-English version I could into a couple of language-translation websites. Yes, I know Google Translate isn’t always that fantastic! That’s why I used more than one, to check them across one another. And then I compared those results to all the modern English translations in books, to see if they were in the neighbourhood of translations created by actual humans who are competent in French. 

            And then, with more than a dozen versions laid out on a table in front of me, I wrestled out our script. What, of the options that made the most sense, sounded best? Were there parts that were just too idiomatic to translate at all? Were there lines that every single translation, book and online-translator, agreed upon? I won’t lie- this wasn’t fun. I’m genuinely terrified that I’ve got something important wrong. As a final fail-safe, before it goes out for reading and performance, it will be read and critiqued by someone who does read medieval French, and can tell me if I need to do some serious editing, or if it’s come out as a reasonable version of the plays. 

            As much as this process has been, let’s be honest, neither easy nor fun, I have no regrets about the time that’s been put into it. On a personal level, it’s inspired me to really attempt to learn French! (Just doing this much work on it, I can definitely read more of it than I could before this project came along.)

            But the major reason this work is pertinent applies to the Pathelin play in particular. (The Washtub doesn’t use language as a dramatic plot-point.) In one of the scenes, Pathelin tries to convince the clothseller that he, Pathelin, is sick to the point of being delusional. He does this by babbling random things in various languages and French dialects. He may be spouting imbecilities in terms of content… but he is actually speaking in those languages, or at least a reasonable enough degree that translation is possible. Yet it’s worth noting that, probably like my own efforts, there are those who have called into question just how much of those languages Pathelin had correct, and how much was true gibberish. If his skills are up to this feat, it’s an incredibly impressive one, given his background as a man who claims more education than he actually has. But to those who have said it would be impossible for the writer to create this scene with knowledge of such breadth… well, let’s just say that I have multiple friends who, though not professional linguists, can comfortably read and write in more than a half-dozen languages, so I am unconvinced by the impossibility of this! It’s worth remembering that, for the upper and professional classes of medieval France- the people who would have written these plays, and at least a reasonable portion of their audience- being at least moderately bilingual was not unusual, as they would have needed French and Latin to conduct legal business, and while education was a privilege, classical languages were seen as a normal part of education, not as luxurious extras.

            Having attempted to put together a plausible iteration of Pathelin, there remained the challenge of putting that scene back into some sort of language that wasn’t English, but would be at least potentially identifiable- knowing whathe’s speaking is part of the joke. I have seen several suggestions on how to achieve this: use the original language, use your own language’s dialects, or use whatever “nonsense” your language might offer up. I felt that using the original language was an enormous lift for actors, especially as this project is for a reading, where they won’t be spending months wrestling with how to pronounce and memorise lines of medieval Limousin or similar. Sadly, dialect in English is mostly moribund- though I hold very dear memories of trying to understand my late adopted grandfather’s delightful Yorkshireisms, neither his children nor theirs use those words and phrases. Instead I went with the third option: modern nonsense, in the form of Pig Latin (familiar enough to most children) and what the internet informs me may be a version of “bubble talk” or “ob”, but I grew up knowing as “Jabay Tabalk”, ‘Jay Talk’, named after the family friend who taught it to me. (I considered trying to use Cockney Rhyming Slang, the one seemingly-nonsense language I do encounter among adults occasionally, but I couldn’t make sense of how an entire paragraph would actually work, and I don’t want to mock a genuine cultural phenomenon.) Hopefully, these choices will result in something not necessarily automatically coherent, yet familiar enough to be recognised as ‘nonsense’! 

            This is also where I must confess to some excisions. The scene with different languages in Pathelin is quite extensive- extravagant, really, in its delight in his macaronic prowess! But it can grind the play to a juddering halt; the point is quickly made, and, dramatically, doesn’t require quite the belabouring it gets. I’ve cut it down to giving Pathelin just two “babbling languages”, just to keep things moving. It loses some of the delight of excess, but it’s dramatically more sound.

            I hope that the result of all this playing with words is a pair of plays that keeps the comic spirit of the original, even if the words aren’t quite the same, and that it even briefly allows the audience to consider just what can be done by playing with language, although I don’t recommend taking any lessons from Pierre Pathelin himself, however clever he is with speaking them.

Director’s Notes: Comedy Tonight!

Posted on by under French Farces, Historic, Musings

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

Two memories:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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