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.