There are many different answers provided by theatre companies over the last 20 years and more – by professional and semi-professional companies from London to Cape Town, Sydney and York. One of the more intriguing reasons was provided by the RSC Mysteries company in the late 1990s when the director Katie Mitchell and company decided to explore the biblical account of who we are by performing their version of English medieval Mystery Plays, only to discover, at a certain point, they’d ‘entered the biblical world through the wrong door’.
Their version of the plays was medieval only insofar as they maintained the shape and an echo of the original language, otherwise it was ‘more like a religious meditation than a conventional drama’, using a hybrid text based on the scriptures and incorporating insights from the apocryphal gospels, the Koran and bits of writing from the original plays. In keeping with contemporary practice about how we might respond to the scriptural account, the intent in these Mysteries was, ‘to humanize and de-politicise’ the medieval plays, trying to historically locate the source material thought to be underwriting them and rooting out what was taken to be any hint of propaganda, so that ‘it was all about personal faith, God within you.’ This approach gave us Jesus as a homeless beggar, Peter as a foul mouthed mugger and Matthew as a commodities broker living in Kensington. Overseeing it all was God, the creator of the universe, as a genial elderly actor with a gentle voice – by way, it seems, of conveying that God is both male and female. In the name of personal responsibility – and because there’s no mention in the Genesis stories – out went the Devil. Once again, for all the different emphases, it’s a not an unfamiliar contemporary response. It seems we can’t handle God and other elements of the mythic landscape while, in this performance, Jesus was explored through ‘a quasi-Stanislavskian character analysis across all available gospels’ to determine the central elements of his character’ (it seems we can handle this.) In 4 Mysteries terms the emphasis was more on the ‘he’ – Jesus as loner – than the ‘he/we’ transformation we take to be a key to opening up the gospels.
Yet, interestingly enough, it was said that in performing their ‘modern mystery play’ the RSC company was more at ease in what was understood to be the mythic realm of the Book of Genesis than it was with the New Testament account, and in particular the gospels, which are a multi-dimensional mix of myth and history; so that, ‘as the story moved towards the New Testament it became less and less engaging.’ In my experience other performances of Mystery Plays have the same problem with Jesus and his story, until we arrive at the Crucifixion where there’s a characteristic mix of some on-the-job humour and intense pathos that is often quite moving.
One of the problems for the RSC Mysteries company was that that the Mystery Plays aren’t based in, or authorized by an historical text, but rather, a long tradition of people imagining the stories they’d inherited, which were part of their lives and the communities they belonged to. In other words, as I’ve had occasion to say on this website, they weren’t so much interested in what really happened back then as in what was happening to them – how the biblical story was coming alive in them. Through an intense collaborative process it seems the RSC company experienced something of this among themselves, meditating together, as it were, on what they had decided were biblical themes -‘God was within you’, faith was personal – though it seems they were intrigued both by what was happening to them in the rehearsal room and what might have happened back then. ( In a sense this was what was happening to them in the room.) It had implications for an audience, their minimalist style of acting establishing ‘a formal relationship between the actors and spectators’ – or even being seen as a means of ‘analyzing the space between the actors and the audience’- so that ‘the division of actor and audience became very apparent.’ The audience may well have leaned forward expectantly according to Katie Mitchell, but someone else suggested that it, ‘rarely glimpsed any wider life beyond the one directly represented on stage.’ In the end, it seems, there was a suggestion that ‘the most we can hope for is an authentic individualism.’
Clearly, this approach was a little different to what Sarah Beckwith once said about the Mystery Plays when she described them as a complex sort of para-liturgy – which means an audience is crucially involved in making the plays, in making meaning – and different again to a renowned modern version of this para-liturgical experience presented at London’s National Theatre from the late 1970s into the 1980s and beyond. One theatre critic had this to say about it: ‘I wish there were another word for performance for it diminishes the thing that has been created , which transcends any idea of a theatre as place we visit to see a play and of a play as that which we visit a theatre to see.’ Here was another answer to the question why perform the Mystery Plays. They were a means to affirming the nature of theatre as an event, of ‘re-discovering a communal theatre’ and so reclaiming ‘an essential part of our dramatic heritage.’ Of course, the realization dawned in the midst of this fellowship and celebration that though they affirmed a need for it there was no reason to be found within the plays themselves for doing so. Equally, by rooting the plays in a gritty 1980s working class environment, by giving back the poetry to ordinary people in Tony Harrison’s vigorous, alliterative verse, they both reclaimed the plays and evinced a 1980s nostalgia for a working class culture.
The Tony Harrison version returned most recently to London, to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, in 2011. Times had changed, as had its’ length, now trimmed from a daylong performance to three hours. It was said to create ‘nothing like the sense of community – of belonging together – that characterized the National Theatre production of the 1980s.’ Though it was not for want of trying, given that the audience was acknowledged at every turn and come the Doomsday scene it was divided into the damned and the saved. This led one critic to describe it as ‘a jokey farce of a last judgment’, which is one way of dealing with it of course. It seems there was a fair bit of ‘roguish romping’ to boot, though the performance wasn’t without it’s grotesque humour and neat touches and the scenes that played well were Abraham and Isaac and the Crucifixion. It may still have been ‘a superlative feat of storytelling’, but, for all that, as one writer noted, there was ‘a lack of imagination, no theatrical revelation’- none of that para-theatrical delight that had been present thirty years previously.
Similarly, someone left the Sydney Theatre Company’s 2009 performance of The Mysteries:Genesis wondering about what constituted community theatre and the role of the audience. She suggested a community event had been ‘made elite’. Yes, the theatre space had been reconstituted as a ‘starkly black’ promenade space, but the audience, commented one critic, were like ghosts in it. That’s not to say it didn’t invite the audience into the show in some way – it did: ‘making sure everyone gets a bit of the action’ – and in ways that didn’t demand a form of ‘audience participation’, but still, ‘we were part of this world as invisible spectators, like ghosts, men and women already passed.’ The three contemporary versions of stories from the book of Genesis – Eden, After the Fall and The Ark – were said to be ‘hilariously tongue-in-cheek and ironic re-tellings of the foundation folk tales of Christianity’, though, it was suggested by the same critic, they still ‘resonate and command despite their patent absurdity.’ There was reference to ‘hypnotic picture making and stunning design’ and a text that ‘lacked identity’, less so perhaps when Noah was seen ‘through the prism of febrile 20thcentury cults.’ Once again, God was imagined as best we could: ‘… an average bloke with an average bloke’s distaste for being disobeyed’, while the devilish bits – as is our wont – were the fun bits (‘There’s a sense of everyone having more fun with the sleaze … ‘) On the one hand the performance was said to feel, ‘odd and contemporaneously right’, while on the other it was reckoned to have not gone far enough in invoking ‘the spirit of the medieval pageant plays’, or breaking with the ‘familiar conventions of contemporary theatre’, or ‘seriously questioning its source material’. Still and all, ‘an interesting and multi-faceted night in the theatre’.
By way of contrast the Isango Ensemble from Cape Town – formerly the Isango Portobello company – have performed their version of The Mysteries:Yiimimangaliso through the 2000s in London and elsewhere. (Most recently they performed an intimate version indoors at Shakespeare’s Globe, in 2016.) The company members come in the main from the shanty towns round Cape Town and there were thirty three of them involved in the 2009 version. It was described as ‘a folksy, funny, yet deeply serious telling of the Christian story’ from the Creation to the Last Judgment; and, ‘a thrilling celebration of God, humanity and the spirit of survival.’ Over twenty years their various re-imaginings of The Mysteries have continued to invite audiences into the telling of a story that enables an experience of ‘communal joy’. As ever, we’re surprised and delighted that we’re able to experience something like this in the theatre, through the telling of these stories. It’s one of the reasons why companies continue to perform the Mystery Plays – they enable us to imagine different ways of making theatre. I like to think that just as the Isango Ensemble has found a moving, joyous way into telling this story from Creation to the Last Judgment – in eight different languages – so too 4 Mysteries might find an interesting way of entering into and imagining the four gospels, inviting an audience to join them in this. Of course, the medieval Mystery Plays aren’t interested in there being four gospels – they tend to shrink down the bits of one story – which is one of the many points of difference between 4 Mysteries and them, but, in one way or another, like all of the versions mentioned here, what we’re looking for is a way of entering into and imagining these fascinating, re-creation stories, one that offers ‘a richer perspective, new theatrical possibilities.’