Tag Archives: rehearsal

In the Home Stretch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Theological Labyrinth: Playing Lucifer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Report from the Rehearsal Room

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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