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!