Wakefield Mysteries and Post-Production Discussion

I attended The Wakefield Mysteries and Doug’s Post-Production Discussion.

The Wakefield Mysteries was a creative reworking of Medieval Drama which took the audience through highlights of the Christian story, from Creation to the birth of Jesus.  The short plays each taught a Biblical story in a way that would have been instructive to the medieval playgoers, especially those who were illiterate.  At the same time, though, they expanded on the stories with humorous characters and theatrical fun.

            The creation story, presented with artistic banners, captured the medieval flavor and thrust the audience into that frame of mind.  The next scene, the Fall of Lucifer, continued the story, with Lucifer’s pride and its disastrous effects clearly staged as an attempted climb onto the mountain of God and a devastating fall from Heaven.  An excellently choreographed dance showed the newly formed band of demons at its most dastardly.  The Garden of Eden scene also made excellent use of dance.  Adam and Eve performed a beautiful dance piece to describe the joy of their newly created life.  After their Fall, they again attempted the dance, this time falling and taking on grotesque positions in place of the graceful ones from before.  The dance made it quite clear that their sin had ruined even their relationship with each other.  Throughout these opening scenes, the Christian theology came through clearly, as did the medieval emphasis on sin.

The Cain and Abel scene included a certain subversive air, making us rather pity Cain than despise him.  His complaints about giving a sacrifice to a far-off God seemed a bit too fitting, considering the aloof position of the Trinity at the upper left of the stage, never involved directly in the action below.  These plays, performed mainly while Catholicism held sway, might have been different had the later Protestant emphasis on free grace and a personal God been in effect.  The next scene broke the tension, though, with a hilarious interaction between Noah (played by a female) and his wife (played by a male).  This scene played on the husband-wife power struggle, a farcical arrangement of what we saw in “The Wyf’s Tale.”  In this case, the husband won.  

The next act opened with a startling, even horrific story: that of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son Isaac.  It emphasized God’s purpose of testing Abraham, yet again made God seem aloof and even cruel.  Of course, there is no comfortable way to tell this story.  Next, the scene shifted to Moses and the Exodus, with a modern-feeling representation of the plagues.  Finally, the story shifted to the New Testament: the Annunciation to a picture-perfect Virgin Mary and the reaction of poor Joseph.  The emphasis on Mary (and her virginity within marriage) again makes sense in light of the Catholic setting, but would have been expunged in later Protestant forms.  

For the last scene, the three shepherds were depicted, fittingly enough, as the down-and-out of today’s world.  This makes sense both in light of the Biblical setting, where shepherds really were on the outskirts of society, and the medieval setting, in which the Wakefield Master makes them complain about the powers that be.  These lowly citizens become the first to witness the nativity.  They also engage in the humorous sheep-retrieval.

The whole play gave me a sense of how it might have felt to watch the original plays.  I was amazed at how it incorporated both humor and deep theological probings.  In fact, it rather bothered me at times – I wished that, at least at the end with the Incarnation, the Trinity would leave its far-off position on the top of the mountain and show some tangible love to mankind.  I wonder how much that concept of a distant God represents the medieval view.  The fact that the play made me think so hard convinced me that it was more than just a “merry romp” or pure entertainment.  At the same time, I loved the dancing, the jokes, and the farce, and their blend with the deeper themes felt at once medieval and contemporarily appropriate.  I imagine that this two-fold experience of depth and fun was part of the original setting as well.  The performance seemed to translate the best of the medieval experience (save perhaps the beer) to the modern setting, and I thoroughly enjoyed the chance to participate.  Watching it enhanced my sense of connection with the people of that time.  During the discussion with Doug afterwards, even further connections came to light, proving once again the power of art to speak to people and to connect them.