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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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