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Mysteries and wheels
Jun. 4th, 2010 10:27 pmOn Thursday of last week - a whole week ago: where do they go? - we went to see the Durham Mysteries. We could have watched the Halfords Tour cycle race instead (Bob the Bolder did), but no, not really, that's not us. Still, what a choice: I love the Northern Echo's headline: "Thousands view Durham Mysteries and cycling contest." It says something about the confused nature of the council's aspirations to be a City of Culture. I suspect the thinking behind the Mysteries was just as confused - certainly my impressions of the evening are.
The idea seems to have been that Durham, like York, is a medieval city, and Durham, like York, should have its Mystery Plays. And since we don't seem to have a medieval cycle of plays, we are free to invent one. The project was hatched between the Gala Theatre and Festival Durham (the County Council organisation which exists to create events which will make Durham into a visitor destination). Writers were invited to pitch for a 20 minute playlet which would be a modern take on the Bible story of their choice. The chosen ten plays were then staged - well, this, I think, was an awkward compromise, neither static nor peripatetic - at a sequence of venues, on three successive evenings. The full programme was: first play at the threatre at 5.30 in the evening; second in the Cathedral at 6.30; and the remaining eight on a specially constructed outdoor stage on the Sands, starting at 7.30 and running through to about 10.30 - that's five hours of theatre, punctuated by a certain amount of walking from A to B. The three venues were ticketed separately, but there was a package deal if you bought all three for the same evening: which may have been administratively easier, but made the evening a bit of a marathon. I might have enjoyed it more if we could have seen blocks of plays on successive nights - but we couldn't have done that anyway, as we were off to London for the weekend on Friday morning.
( But apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the plays? )
Postscript: as we were leaving, we were given a flyer asking us to give online feedback about the event, and, thinking I would say some of what I've said here, I did. But the questions weren't about the plays, the staging at all: they were all about how far I had travelled to come to Durham, and how much money I had spent here.
Post=postscript: at lunchtime today I was telephoned by someone doing market research about what I thought about the event. He'd presumably got my contact details from the theatre, because he started by asking me to confirm my name and post-code. Then he asked how far I'd travelled to come to Durham: I hadn't, I told him, I live in the city. "Oh, I wasn't expecting that," he said. What, he couldn't tell from my DH1 postcode? There's clearly a strong expectation that the Mysteries would bring visitors into the city - and since we saw many of our neighbours among the audience, I rather doubt it.
The idea seems to have been that Durham, like York, is a medieval city, and Durham, like York, should have its Mystery Plays. And since we don't seem to have a medieval cycle of plays, we are free to invent one. The project was hatched between the Gala Theatre and Festival Durham (the County Council organisation which exists to create events which will make Durham into a visitor destination). Writers were invited to pitch for a 20 minute playlet which would be a modern take on the Bible story of their choice. The chosen ten plays were then staged - well, this, I think, was an awkward compromise, neither static nor peripatetic - at a sequence of venues, on three successive evenings. The full programme was: first play at the threatre at 5.30 in the evening; second in the Cathedral at 6.30; and the remaining eight on a specially constructed outdoor stage on the Sands, starting at 7.30 and running through to about 10.30 - that's five hours of theatre, punctuated by a certain amount of walking from A to B. The three venues were ticketed separately, but there was a package deal if you bought all three for the same evening: which may have been administratively easier, but made the evening a bit of a marathon. I might have enjoyed it more if we could have seen blocks of plays on successive nights - but we couldn't have done that anyway, as we were off to London for the weekend on Friday morning.
( But apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the plays? )
Postscript: as we were leaving, we were given a flyer asking us to give online feedback about the event, and, thinking I would say some of what I've said here, I did. But the questions weren't about the plays, the staging at all: they were all about how far I had travelled to come to Durham, and how much money I had spent here.
Post=postscript: at lunchtime today I was telephoned by someone doing market research about what I thought about the event. He'd presumably got my contact details from the theatre, because he started by asking me to confirm my name and post-code. Then he asked how far I'd travelled to come to Durham: I hadn't, I told him, I live in the city. "Oh, I wasn't expecting that," he said. What, he couldn't tell from my DH1 postcode? There's clearly a strong expectation that the Mysteries would bring visitors into the city - and since we saw many of our neighbours among the audience, I rather doubt it.
