Category Archives: York Mystery Plays 2026

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.

Cast & Creative Team for “The War in Heaven”

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

We are excited to share the cast & creative team who are bringing forth The War in Heaven for the York Mystery Plays Festival 2026. Find out more about our production on our Current Projects page.

CAST
Angel EnsembleFreddie Amy
Fallen Angel EnsembleChristopher Bradshaw
1st AngelJacob Carhart
2nd Fallen AngelRobin Denley Bowers
3rd Fallen AngelOliver Eardley
LuciferColin Hayes
2nd AngelImogen Lisle-Clarke
GodEhren Mierau
3rd AngelWill Seddon
1st Fallen AngelSue Whyte
CREATIVE TEAM
DirectorLaura-Elizabeth Rice
DesignerLaura-Elizabeth Rice
ComposerSamuel Fernandes Morais
Musical DirectorSamuel Fernandes Morais
Puppet DirectorCatherine McRae
Assistant DirectorIrem Saticioglu

We are still seeking Waggon Crew for The War in Heaven – please see our Jobs & Opportunities page for details & to sign up.

Report from the Rehearsal Room

Posted on by under Musings, Drama, 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.

Introducing the Gild of Freemen of the City of York

Posted on by under History, Mystery Plays, News, York Mystery Plays 2026

This #MysteryPlayMonday we’re excited to talk about our partnership with the Gild of Freemen of the City of York, a local civic organisation build on medieval foundations with more than three decades of involvement with the modern Mystery Plays.

As we’ve previously mentioned, the play “The Fall of the Angels”, which this year has been rename “The War in Heaven”, was owned, in the Middle Ages, by the Tanners’ Guild. This organisation, made up of those men who worked in the creation of leather, has ceased to exist in the city (as indeed has the industry itself), and so we “represent” them only in the theatrical and historical sense.

Modern York does, however, continue to have guilds- largely industry-based fraternal organisations today- as do several other cities around the UK. In York, there are seven: the Merchant Taylors, the Merchant Adventurers, the Guild of Building, the Cordwainers, the Butcher, the Scriveners, and the Gild of the Freemen of the City of York. This last is unique among them, in that it is not based on a particular industry in which its members work; rather, its origins lie in the citizens who occupied a unique niche in the social and governmental hierarchy of England. 

Medieval freemen were a sort of proto-middle class, men who were not among the nobility but were not tied to land or lords as serfs, nor under indenture to a trade master. They were, literally, free: to move around, to establish a career, to farm land that they might rent or own, but to which they were not permanently tied. In order to join any guild, or to trade within the city, one first had to have the status of freeman. And those who had such status also had privileges like being allowed to graze their animals on the common land, which in York we know as the Strays. They had responsibilities, too: freemen had to pay taxes, maintain the city’s infrastructure, defend it if needed, and help manage the city and its trade. In time, freemen became the only residents eligible to vote. This menu of privilege and responsibility meant that freemen were often the officeholders of the city, and the ones in charge of its various functions, both civic and economic. 

In the Middle Ages, “freeman” was a status, but it wasn’t a group, or organisation, or guild unto itself. Their precise role changed over the centuries, but they were never a coherent, unified body. In 1953, however, the freemen of York came together and decided that their shared status would have greater meaning and usefulness to the city if they formed a formal organisation. The Gild of Freemen was thus established: a modern society built on ancient roots. 

In 1994, the Mystery Plays, having been revived on a quadrennial basis since 1951 as large, staged productions, were shifted back to their historic performance method: processional waggons performing in open air throughout the city of York. The city guilds once again became involved in the event, which had been a key part of their civic responsibility during the Middle Ages. The Gild of Freemen, however, did not “own” a play from the medieval period, as all members of all the guilds were simply “free men”. But, civic-minded as the members were, the Gild got involved anyway, pairing, as the other guilds did, with organisations and dramatic groups keen to be part of this special, very York event. In 1998 and 2006 they were responsible for  “The Temptation of Christ”, in 2002 the Gild partnered to stage “The Conspiracy Against Jesus”, and from 2010-2022 they settled into working on “The Fall of Man”, the story of Adam & Eve, with “Cain & Abel” as well in 2010. 

With the Gild’s mission being focused on the “enhancement of the City of York and the furtherance of the interest of its citizens”, they couldn’t choose a better project than supporting the Mystery Plays! Although seemingly small in scale (none of the plays are longer than half an hour, and waggons are obviously quite petite as stages) they are an enormous undertaking, and there is nothing else in the world quite like them. Hundreds of York residents, York-born and those who have adopted the city as home, take part, reflecting the rich tapestry of a city that punches far above its weight in terms of theatre and performance. Even those who don’t participate or even watch the Mystery Plays on their quadrennial outing seem to be aware, and proud, of this event. Moreover, as one had first to hold the status of freeman in medieval York before one was permitted to join a guild or trade in the city, in a sense the Freemen may feel a special connection to the plays, since they were, if not as a formal entity but as an idea, the foundation for all of the plays and those involved with them. 

We’re so pleased to be working with the Gild this year! Their history as something new built upon the shoulders of something deeply historic feels very close to our own story, and we share their deep affection for the beautiful city of York, which is certainly the home of our hearts if not always our bodies. It really does add an extra layer of connection to our production! We look forward to having members of the Gild process with us and our waggon during the performance days, and to working with them to add another proud chapter to the history of York.

If you’d like to know more about the Gild of Freemen of the City of York, please visit their website at freemenofyork.co.uk

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.

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.

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.

Director’s Notes: Designing the Mystery

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

Happy Easter #MysteryPlayMonday! We’ve been busy designing our production of “The War In Heaven”, and our show’s director reflects on what it means to imagine portraying heaven, hell, and their inhabitants.

What does an angel look like? How about a daemon? Or Heaven, or Hell?

I’ve been designing this week, getting the answers to those questions get out of my brain and on to paper, so that they can eventually be brought to life on our Mystery Play waggon. The week when I sketch and model, putting to paper what has been evolving in my brain for months, is always fun. And it tends to be when observations that have been quietly bubbling under the surface coalesce into coherent thoughts.

One of the things that I’ve been ruminating on, both from a directorial standpoint concerned with characters, and an visual one concerned with design, is, wacky angels aside, the discrepancy in visual stability between good and evil. I don’t mean in a philosophical or moral sense, I mean in terms of how we picture them. To whit: if you grew up in a western, Christian-dominant society, I bet when you picture God, you envision an old man with white hair and a beard sitting on a throne, gesturing down from a sunny, white-clouded heaven. Your idea of Hell is probably full of fire. If I say the word “angel”, you’re almost definitely picturing wings. (The latter, I have learned, actually has an interesting history, but the development of angels was mostly pretty early in church history, and the idea of a human-based angel was well in place by the time our Mystery Plays were first being performed.)

Hell and daemons seem to offer much more flexibility to people wanting to get creative. If I had to theorise, I’d surmise that it’s because what the biblical texts offer up in terms of Hellish descriptions are among the more… trippy… parts of that literature. And who can blame Christians of the first thousand years of that faith if they felt that, since canonical texts went well off into the creative weeds when describing Hell, they had license to do so as well? If Ezekiel gets credit for the strange angels (I’m planning to write more about them in an upcoming essay), the John who wrote the Book of Revelation can be given the palm for kicking off the creativity of designing Hell. But it was probably Dante Alighieri who sent the ball well and truly rolling. His Divine Comedy was wildly influential throughout the medieval world, probably because his depictions of Heaven and Hell were so detailed and intriguing. Even today, much of what we colloquially think about Hell is based on his writing. But it’s worth noting that, although he wrote both, you hear a lot more about “Dante’s Inferno” than about “Dante’s Paradiso”. 

I am not an expert in the psychology of medieval people or medieval theology, but my guess is that this is in line with why people find the demons of Mankind compelling: it’s easier, as humans who know ourselves to be flawed, to relate to the troublemakers and their world than it is to relate to the idealised space and beings that the angels can offer. Everyone might want to imagine that they align with the angelic sphere, but deep down suspects that they share more in common with the minor devils and their mischief. Additionally, I wonder if there isn’t a bit of a fear of stepping on toes if one gets God or the angels wrong. (Anybody else thinking of the “Monkey Jesus” incident?) You can’t sin against a demon or the Devil by making wrong choices about how they look or where they live, but perhaps people feel that they could do so if they mess up on Heaven. Or perhaps they just recognise that when something exists to be The Ideal, The Perfect Place, no human imagination could begin to create a vision equal to that perfection. You can’t screw up with demons because, by definition, they’re already messed up.

So where does this leave us with designing these characters and their spaces? With opposite challenges! Hell is so wide open, there are almost no limitations, and that can be harder to imagine than something with parameters. Heaven is so constrained by the need to be pleasant and appealing, but it can’t be boring, since boring would be off-putting, which is why (spoiler!) I’m leaning on the “Heaven” panel of “The Garden of Earthly Delights” for inspiration. With our angels, some practical facts are brought into the equation: we had angels in 2014’s “Baptism” so we already own purpose-built angel costumes, although I plan to add to those. Angels with feathers are depicted in so many places throughout medieval art, particularly in architectural spaces, that I remain comfortable with that choice. Would they have been white? Probably not! But this is where the bridge between the historic and the modern come in contact: people today expect angels to be white and would struggle to understand a red-and-gold feathered person as an angel. Historic drama needs to speak across the divide of time, not steamroll past it, and finding the balance between them being able to follow the familiar symbols of stories that they know, and creating something new and memorable, is a fine line to walk in designing.

I don’t know yet if our set for Hell will feature my favourite item from medieval Hell: the Hellmouth. There are practical considerations that might make the decision. But I absolutely love medieval Hellmouths, and I don’t know why they fell out of fashion as embodied things. We still hear the term “hellmouth”, but we’re not usually picturing the wide-mouthed, grinning, surprisingly benevolent-expressioned creature of medieval manuscripts. (I think I wrote years ago that they remind me of dogs asking for belly rubs, and I stand by that!) I do know that our demons are planned to be interesting and multi-faceted. In keeping with the observation that Hell brings out creativity in ways Heaven doesn’t, Hell will be populated by more variety of creatures than Heaven.

And of course, there is God! God is, literally, impossible to design in the way that the character demands, which means we first have to dispense with seeing the character as representing in any way the actual idea of the theological “God”. The God of the Mystery Plays is first and foremost a human being (there’s probably some serious theological layering about Jesus in this- ironically I am writing this on Easter!) and does not have to be what he also cannot be: all things to all people, perfection and omnipotent. One of the really brilliant things about the Mystery Plays over the past 75 years, however, is that God has been: male, female, white, brown, old, young, a child, Christian and, yes, not Christian! Our depiction has always been and probably will be medieval-inspired, but final decisions will probably me made after casting, so that “God” has a chance to influence “who” they will be onstage. One wants, after all, to be at least a tiny bit creative for the creator!

The brilliant thing about the Mystery Plays is that no two groups, either in the same year or across the past seventy five years, have come up with the same answers to these questions. And all of the modern iterations are wildly different from what was going on in the Middle Ages. When I think about the thousands of different minds that have gone into trying to make sense of these characters and their world, for these plays alone, it’s mind-boggling. One of the seminal books on modern mystery plays is titled “Playing God”, reflecting on the literal practice of the actor doing so, but I think it’s in the way all the different teams create their own little slice of the story, in a way that’s uniquely their own, that is truly a miracle of creation.

A Director Prepares… With Medieval Theology

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

On today’s #MysteryPlayMonday, our “War in Heaven” director talks about how looking at medieval beliefs about our play’s story influence her ideas about the characters & the production.

So much of the drama of the twentieth century was a push towards realism. I don’t mean the way it’s staged, I mean that there has been a trend away from characters who exist primarily as relatively flat “types”, without a lot of nuance or subtext. When modern actors or directors start with a new project, assuming we’re working with an established script-based drama, we sit down and read it and ask it lots of questions- what does that line really mean? Hmm, is my character hiding something in this scene? What does this scene show us about the relationship between those two characters? What is there on the page and what is, metaphorically, underneath the page?

I think it would be selling medieval plays short to suggest that you can’t do that with them, but you do have to wrestle with two things. The first is that it’s obvious that these plays weren’t written by authors thinking about, or intentionally creating, the answers to those questions. (Their work isn’t lacking in complexity- just consider their technical accomplishments as verse drama! But it’s a different kind of complexity.) The second is that, when you start asking anything of the script that isn’t right on the page, you’re inevitably going to bump into questions of theology, some of which various thinkers among the many branches of Christianity have been contemplating and debating for centuries. The medieval playwrights had to know about those debates, how they had been settled, or if they hadn’t, they had to make their own choices about weighty matters in order to write their play.

Let me be clear that I don’t mean you have to be a person of faith yourself, and none of us are medieval Catholics, although the originators certainly were. But you may have to think about their ideas and understandings of medieval Catholicism. That, in itself, leads to other interesting questions, since faith is ultimately personal and interior: knowing what was doctrinally acceptable to the Vatican doesn’t tell us much about how our ordinary medieval tanner understood his faith, much less what that meant to him!

I’ve been thinking especially hard about this as we approach auditions, because this pre-audition time is the one moment that the actors get a chance to look at this play with a completely clean slate and make of it what they will. That’s the exciting thing about auditions (to go with the nervous thing)- actors are amazing at finding interpretations that I hadn’t even considered! I’m not even going to potentially muddy the waters by stating what some of my “character questions” are for the characters they will eventually portray. I will say that I hope they don’t feel the need to go on a crash-course about medieval theology or philosophy. But can’t promise that they won’t end up at least taking a glance at those things during the next few months, either!

An example of the kind of thing I mean is one that does not directly pertain to us, but is an interesting insight into the mindset of medieval theologians. You’ve almost certainly heard the expression: “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” It’s come down to us to mean, essentially, “there are things we can debate until the end of time but it’s not just the answer that doesn’t matter, the question itself has no point because it’s all unknowable.” Well, here’s what I’ve learned as I’ve been reading up on medieval angels. First, that’s a misquote- it’s actually “the point of a pin”- a much smaller space. Second, medieval people didn’t literally debate this issue at all; the question was used later as a way of mocking some of the minutia that medieval theologians had supposedly wasted their time contemplating. What they were actually debating wasn’t as fatuous as this question, taken literally, would suggest: they were debating whether or not angels were corporeal beings, with physical presence. Given how important incarnation is to Christianity (the idea that God became physically present via Jesus is one of the central tenets to the religion), it doesn’t seem absurd that the question of whether other heavenly beings could move between spiritual and physical reality was a concern with wider implications. After all, isn’t the boundary between the physical and the metaphysical at the heart of all religion? We’re alive- corporeal, physically present- and then we’re not- can we exist without that molecular matter? Isn’t that question the basic reason why humanity has developed religion in the first place? Angels on pin-points may have been sarcastic, but its implications weren’t frivolous.

The Mystery Plays don’t have to dig into this question of non/corporeal angels because the plays inherently embrace the physicality of things beyond understanding; the contradiction between recognising that God was unknowable and unseeable, and watching our neighbour portray him, was baked in. But I use this as an example of the kind of theological debate that you inevitably stumble into while trying to make sense of a character. They don’t all resolve so neatly for our purposes, and some of them have very real implications for a potential interpretation of a character. An angel that is physically closer to human form would have a very different character and experience than an angel who exists solely in an ethereal celestial cosmos! (And the original concept of some angels wasn’t close to human form at all, which is a whole other set of questions.)

Another thing that makes complex theological questions inevitable for us, in particular, is that the War in Heaven does not, strictly speaking, exist in the Bible. It’s a story made up from several small parts scattered throughout the Old Testament and Revelation in particular, but it’s not a well-defined event in the same manner as, for example, the Nativity or the Crucifixion. And yet it was very much a concept, as a complete tradition, created out of questions that were debated and argued well before our play was written. The genesis and evolution of the story that inspires our play is the product of all sorts of theological conceptualising, and that inevitably helps shape our concept of God, Lucifer, and their followers.

Bottom line: it’s possible to imagine these characters outside of all this theological framework, but if one is trying to really round them out into a more nuanced, “modern” acting challenge, an actor is probably going to discover that medieval theology was messy, complicated, disputed, and surprisingly interesting. You don’t have to believe in any of it to find medieval belief, and the lengths people would go to define it, remarkable. If, by our modern understanding of character development, medieval writers seem to shortchange their characters, we in turn may be short-changing the complexity of the religious matrix within which they were writing them. Their faith doesn’t have to be ours, but it’s a doorway we can peer through to try and bridge the gap that times leaves between us.