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The Mystery Plays: A Wrap-up

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

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.

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!