3 - Creating Medieval Drama: Student Actors, Public Audiences, and Middle English Plays

Summary

WITHIN THE ACADEMIC field of medieval drama, scholarly participants in the discipline have long acknowledged that undertaking contemporary performances of medieval plays can provide a unique and rich set of insights into their forms, structures, and imaginative worlds. These insights, moreover, are often not revealed by the experience of simply reading the plays as texts on the page: the processes of performance and the experience of live theatre can open up seemingly opaque or remote medieval theatrical texts in radical and surprising ways, both for performers and for audience members. This is perhaps especially true of medieval religious drama, particularly those plays whose narrative action is based on parts of the Bible or associated apocryphal material which is now largely unfamiliar to many, or those plays which focus on specific, Christian (indeed, Catholic) faith based concepts or rituals which are no longer widely familiar, and definitely not universally practised, in a twenty first century, multicultural and more secularized society. Here, performance can play a vital role in rendering the core ideas of medieval religious theatrical texts critically accessible without losing any of their complexity or density.

This essay describes and reflects on student created performances of medieval religious drama, in terms of what the act of creating their own performances can bring to student learning and critical thinking about unfamiliar medieval theatre, and in terms of the ways in which undertaking performance can spark critical reflections from spectators which enable re evaluation of, and new engagement with, the medieval texts. It considers the experience of performing medieval plays largely from the perspective of student actors. These comprised two different groups of undergraduate students at the University of Oxford (some, but not all of whom were English Literature students) who developed and rehearsed public performances of, respectively, Everyman and The Digby Play of St Mary Magdalen; in the case of both plays, the student actors were mostly new to medieval English literature.