Did you see one of our performances of The War in Heaven during The York Mystery Plays Festival 2026? If so, we would love to hear what you thought of the show. We aim to enrich the lives of audience members and creative participants with our work, so we really value your opinions and take them on board to help shape our future projects. We’d greatly appreciate it if you’d take a moment to fill out our Audience Feedback Form – it will be available until 30th July 2026. (If you were involved in making the show, you have been emailed a different form asking about your experience as a participant.)
Tag Archives: york mystery plays
The Mystery Plays: A Wrap-up
It’s in the spirit of #mysteryplaymonday, even though it’s midweek. We’re saying farewell to the York Mystery Plays 2026, to our wonderful cast and creatives, and we’re also in the middle of a clear-out of stuff! But, with a few days to process behind her, our play’s director is taking a few minutes to reflect on the ups, downs, and joys of “The War in Heaven”.
What happened to Mystery Play Monday- isn’t this a Wednesday? I can hear you asking, and you’re right. The answer is simple: we all needed a couple days to rest, recover, dismantle, and let go. I for one have been a puddle of emotion about the ending of the mystery plays: pride in what we accomplished, joy at a successful run, happiness for having met so many new, wonderful people who I hope will stay in touch… that all runs right up against the wall of ending, saying goodbye, and physically pulling apart something that you’ve spent months building. It’s very abrupt, and it’s a lot to process.
That’s theatre, always has been and always will be, but I never really find it any easier. So I needed a bit of breathing space to mentally process everything before I could sit down and write my reflections on it.
The mystery plays are incredibly central to my life and my story, they’re the genesis of HIDden as an organisation, but I can’t pretend they are always an unalloyed blessing. Street theatre is difficult. Amateur theatre is too. Throw in processional staging through the streets of a busy city, and eight or nine different companies, and there are a lot of moving parts; even if we, as HIDden, don’t have to deal with all of those things, the totality of the whole means that there is a lot to organise, and a lot which can fall through cracks. There were definitely days where “frustrating” is the only answer I could have given, if someone asked me how things were going. It would be a misstep for me to paint over that as if it weren’t a truth just as real as the good parts. It was hard work- incredibly hard- and it’s always done by far fewer people than is ideal.
But it’s also a moment to feel incredibly proud. Our cast and crew were amazing. Nine performances without a single line blip or choreography mistake (I’m not saying there weren’t a few minor issues, but they were largely mechanical or entirely out of our control, like having a building alarm go off in the middle of the Shambles performance on Wednesday night, through which the cast sailed with imperturbable grace). I’ve heard nothing but positive comments from people who saw it, so while there are always things one knows one could do better, I feel safe in saying that the production did what all theatre is meant to do, first and foremost: it engaged and entertained its audience.
I can’t praise the people in our group enough. The waggon master and crew did an incredible job of moving Large Rolley, our waggon, through the streets, with a smooth elegance. (This may sound like an odd thing to say but trust me, I’ve seen waggons struggle!) The volunteers who helped with costumes and puppets leaped in with both feet and weren’t afraid to offer suggestions for how to achieve the end goal, which I always appreciate, because we’re all in this together! The creative team brought ideas and viewpoints that were fresh and unlike anything we’ve ever done. And the cast- amazingly, I just read through a journal entry I wrote right after audition week, where I said that I had such confidence in our cast that I wasn’t nervous about the production from that very early date! That’s awfully early to be counting any dramatic chickens, but that instinct that we had a very solid group of people proved out through the rehearsal and performance process. They really were delightful and interesting people, whose enthusiasm for acting and the Mystery Plays in particular made me feel utterly secure. They were also wonderfully flexible, as we reworked scenes and hammered out technical difficulties, like how to change Lucifer from a white feathered angel to a singed and burnt denizen of hell. Their suggestions and insights also helped shape the show.
It’s always the people that make the Mystery Plays what they are. I imagine that has always been true: the guilds that originally staged them were communities, bound together by a shared trade, a shared city, and often close family ties as well. I think about those people a lot during our production and its development, because I feel like they are part of it, too. In fact, if someone asked me to sum up why I love the mystery plays in one word, that word would be connection. It’s the connections that we make between different companies, working together for this large-scale shared event, and even more the connections among the people we work with directly. Hopefully, new friendships are formed that will last beyond just this play, maybe for years or even a lifetime. We find connection with the guilds and their members, and we connect with audience members, who are part of our story even if we never know their names. And I think we connect with everyone who has ever been part of the plays in previous years, or even previous centuries, be they twentieth-century or fourteenth. When we work on the plays, we’re stretching our hands out to touch theirs, just as they were, perhaps unconsciously, reaching forward to us, their posterity. We’re all connected, everyone who has had some contact with these plays, as part of York’s story. I know it’s Rome that is called “the eternal city” but if you’ve ever lived in York, you will appreciate that the name feels right for it, too.
The Mystery Plays can sometimes be the concentrated distillation of those features of theatre which drive us most to despair- but they are equally intensely the kind of event that brings out all the best aspects of theatre as well. It tends to be the latter that we remember the most clearly: the shiver of excitement when your waggon rolls by York Minster and you feel the weight of history on you, the adrenaline of performing several times in quick succession under incredibly varied conditions, the happy rush (and tears) when you realise that it’s finished and you’ve all done so brilliantly. I hope everyone involved will treasure these memories, as I will, for the rest of their lives. And I hope we’ve made it an experience that will bring them back for more historic drama, because there are so many more stories to share.
The War in Heaven: Bibliography
For our #mysteryplaymonday, our play’s director shares the research that has helped to inform our production.
Both fortunately and unfortunately, a full bibliography of the York Mystery Plays would be far too large to list here! There are many wonderful books that I would recommend to anyone who isn’t especially familiar with the Plays, and many of them have informed our play in the long term, since they have also gone into my academic work over the last twenty years. But of necessity I’ve chosen to focus here on those studies that were either especially helpful or are specific to our project with The War in Heaven. If you are interested in reading about the York Mystery Plays on a more general level, please email me (Laura) and I would be happy to offer suggestions!
Ashton, Gail. “Bridging the Difference: Reconceptualising the Angel in Medieval Hagiography”, in Literature & Theology, vol. 16 no. 3 (Sept 2002), pp. 235-247.
Auffarth, Christoph and Loren T. Stuckenbruck, eds. The Fall of the Angels. (2004) Brill: Leiden and Boston.
Berefelt, Gunnar. A Study on the Winged Angel. (1968) Almqvist & Wiksell: Stockholm.
Butterworth, Philip & Katie Normington. Medieval Theatre Performance. (2017) D.S. Brewer: Cambridge
Chase, Steven. Angelic Spirituality. (2002) Paulist Press: New York.
Davidson, Clifford. Staging the York Creation and Fall of Lucifer. (1976) American Society for Theatre Research: Pittsburgh.
DuBruck, Edelgard. “The Devil and Hell in Medieval French Drama: Prolegomena”, in Romania, vol. 100, no. 398 (1979), pp 165-179.
Eszenyi, Edina. “The Edge of Heaven: Revelations 12:7-9 and the Fall of the Rebel Angels in Anglo-Norman Apocalypse Illustration”, in Arts(2022), vol. 11, p. 41.
Fox, Michael. “Alefric on the Creation and Fall of the Angels”, in Anglo-Saxon England (2002), Vol. 31, pp. 175-200.
Gabor, Ittzes. “Spirits Immortal In and Out of Time”, in The AnaChronisT (2004), vol. 10, pp. 1-30.
Gathercole, Patricia May. Depiction of Angels and Devils in Medieval French Manuscript Illumination. (2004) Edwin Mellen Press: Lewiston, NY.
Gill, Meredith J. Angels and the Order of Heaven in Medieval and Renaissance Italy. (2021) Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Harkins, Franklin T. “The Embodiment of Angels: a Debate in Mid-Thirteenth-Century Theology”, in Recherches de theologie et philosophie medievales (2011), vol. 78, no. 1, pp: 25-58.
Hoffman, Tobias, ed. Companion to Angels in Medieval Philosophy. (2012) Brill: Leiden.
Hoffman, Tobias. Free Will and the Rebel Angels in Medieval Philosophy. (2021) Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Iribarren, Isabel & Martin Lenz. Angels in Medieval Philosophical Inquiry. (2008) Ashgate: New York.
Koszkalo, Martyna and Robert Koszkalo. “What the Fall of Angels Tells Us About the Essence of Morality”, in Religions (2021), vol. 12, p 920.
Lyle, Marie Caroline. “The Relation of the Lucifer Tradition in the Literary Composition of the Middle Ages to the Story of the Fall of the Angels in the Mystery Plays”, unpublished thesis, University of Minnesota (1912).
Martin, Dale Basil. “When Did Angels Become Demons?”, in Journal of Biblical Literature (2010), vol. 129, no. 4, pp. 657-677.
Medicus, Gustav. “Some Observations on Domenico Beccafumi’s Two ‘Fall of the Rebel Angels’ Panels”, in Artibus et Historiae (2003), vol. 24, no. 47, pp. 209-218.
Murphy, Mary Agnes. Representation of Angels & Angelic Orders. unpublished MA thesis, University of Leicester, Jan 2010.
Norcross, Katherine R. “Counter-Empathy and Elegiac Critique in the Old English Christ and Satan“, in Philological Quarterly (2017), 96.2, pp. 143-170.
Ogilvie, Sheilagh. “The Economics of Guilds”, in Journal of Economic Perspectives (2014), vol. 28, no. 4, pp. 169-192.
Pagels, Elaine. “Christian Apologists and ‘The Fall of the Angels’: An Attack on Roman Imperial Power?”, in Harvard Theological Review (1985), vol. 78, no. 3/4, pp. 301-325.
Parma, Mariana Valeria. “Entre los Signos del Cielo y las Voces de los Hombres: la Vision Medieval del Cielo y Su Representacion Apocaliptica”, in Espacio, Tiempo y Forma (2019), pp. 473-498.
Raiswell, Richard & David R. Winter, eds. The Medieval Devil: a Reader. (2022) University of Toronto Press.
Rice, Nicole R. & Margaret Pappano. The Civic Cycles. (2024) University of Notre Dame Press.
Rosser, Gervase. Crafts, Guilds and the Negotiation of Work in the Medieval Town. (1997) Oxford University Press for the Past & Present Society.
Schall, James V. The Politics of Heaven and Hell. (2020) Ignatius Press: San Francisco.
Schmindt, Gary D. The Iconography of the Mouth of Hell. (1995) Associated University Presses: Selinsgrove, PA.
Shinners, John Raymond. Medieval Popular Religion, 1000-1500. (2009) University of Toronto Press: North York.
Sowerby, Richad. Angels in Early Medieval England. (2016) Oxford University Press: London
Tamburr, Karl. “The Dethroning of Satan in the Chester Cycle”, in Neuphilologische Mitteilungen (1984), vol. 85, no. 3, pp. 316-328.
Toulmin Smith, Joshua & Lucy Toulmin Smith, English Guilds. (1870). Trubner: London
Vos, Nienke & Willemien Otten. Demons and the Devil in Ancient and Medieval Christianity. (2011) Brill: Leiden.
Walker, Greg. “‘In the Beginning…’: Performing the Creation in the York Corpus Christi Play”, in The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama, ed. Thomas Betteridge and Greg Walker (2012), pp. 36-54.
‘The War in Heaven’ digital programme available
In light of the first performance day of the York Mystery Plays 2026, we are pleased to share the digital programme for our production of The War in Heaven. Find it here
Behind the Scenes: Thousands of Feathers & Finger Painting
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”
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 Ensemble | Freddie Amy |
| Fallen Angel Ensemble | Christopher Bradshaw |
| 1st Angel | Jacob Carhart |
| 2nd Fallen Angel | Robin Denley Bowers |
| 3rd Fallen Angel | Oliver Eardley |
| Lucifer | Colin Hayes |
| 2nd Angel | Imogen Lisle-Clarke |
| God | Ehren Mierau |
| 3rd Angel | Will Seddon |
| 1st Fallen Angel | Sue Whyte |
| CREATIVE TEAM | |
|---|---|
| Director | Laura-Elizabeth Rice |
| Designer | Laura-Elizabeth Rice |
| Composer | Samuel Fernandes Morais |
| Musical Director | Samuel Fernandes Morais |
| Puppet Director | Catherine McRae |
| Assistant Director | Irem Saticioglu |
First Rehearsals! and the Questions They Bring Up
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
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.
Director’s Notes: Designing the Mystery
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
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.
HIDden Theatre 
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