Mysteries and wheels

[shewhomust]

On 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.

So, to the theatre at tea-time for the fall of Lucifer. Gavin Williams (disclaimer: Gavin's a friend) transposed the story to a very convincing Heaven's Got Talent, with Lucifer as the wannabe rockstar, put out at losing his victory to God's new favourite, man. The aptness of this template gave plenty of scope for one-liners, mimicry, parody - and the cast (students from the Sixth Form College) grabbed them with both hands. I particularly liked the panel of judges: Gabriel(le), the tinselled fairy princess, who loved everyone, Michael, the macho military type, all aggression, and Metatron, stern but fair (well, fairish). And of course the audience had a vote, too.

Then we trouped up the hill to the Cathedral, for a choral work with a cast of thousands hundreds which reprised the fall of Lucifer as a prelude to the Fall of Adam and Eve. We were welcomed (if that's the word) by a member of the Cathedral clergy, who put my back up by informing us that these were 'mystery' plays because they encouraged us to think on the mysteries of religion, and telling us that since we were in the Cathedral, we should start with a prayer. The music itself made little impression on me, the libretto was in pseudo-archaic (sample couplet: Illuminating treasure, the fruit of this tree will open thine eyes to understanding / And makest thou, Eve, most knowing and wise to thine own Godliness), and the best thing about the performance was the way the large number of participants were costumed - which, since there was no raised stage, we could barely see. A choir of small children wearing green t-shirts appliqued with leaves waved branches to represent the Garden of Eden; another wore silver turbans and a single long length of cloth to represent the Serpent. The Apple was someone small and round and invisible.

We had managed to park the car near enough to the Sands that we now had time to collect our folding chairs (actually, samarcand and Candy's folding chairs, and we were very grateful for the loan) and sandwiches, and settle down to watch Ian MacMillan's God's Day Off. God, having completed his creation, takes a day off. He deserves a rest, and he wants to savour the anticipation of how it all turns out. Eventually he can't contain his impatience any more, and he takes a look - and is horrified at what he sees: humanity have turned into chavs. And worse, though I was unclear what the 'worse' actually was. God's Day Off was my biggest disappointment of the evening, because I've enjoyed Ian MacMillan's work in the past. It began well, using verse dialogue to create a picture of God as a pleasant, naïve sort of fellow, but dragging this out didn't create anticipation, it created tedium (this wasn't the only play to make me think that, short though 20 minutes is, it was too long, and the author was struggling to fill it). God's middle-class horror at the low ways of humanity seemed over-simplified: they were, after all, as he had created them. But perhaps, having failed to get the punch-line, I'm doing the play an injustice.

Mother and son team Ellen and Fred Phethean (disclaimer: Ellen's a client) told the story of Cain and Abel in hip-hop style. The brothers are represented by two teams of dancers, in contrasting coloured t-shirts bearing the tags of the two brothers. This worked surprisingly well: it created a framework for the young dancers to show what they could do. Their energy and enthusiasm were persuasive, though it would have taken really great dancers to make the piece catch fire.

Next came an intermission, an animation projected on the screens on either side of the stage. Durham City Arts (not dead yet, then) had worked with prisoners in Frankland jail to riff on the story of Jonah and the whale in a humorous piece about football and tribalism (Sunderland supporters are saved from the error of their ways). It was actually quite funny, if you didn't look too seriously at what was being said - and perhaps it suffered from being shown immediately before a play which was extremely funny, and felt less mean-spirited.

This was the hit of my evening, David Almond's Noah & the Fludd. God has rather lost interest in creation: the next time, she says, she will make a world with no land at all, only sea (I don't know at what point God was cast as a woman in a blue-stained apron: it worked brilliantly, but the dialogue refered to god as 'he'). But the angels - a gaggle of girls in white feathery wings and rainbow striped leg-warmers - persuade her that something must be done about this unruly and disrespectful humanity. Only Noah is to be reprieved; well, only Noah and his wife; and their sons - and, very well, their wives; and the animals, of course, including the giraffes ("What's a giraffe?" - they manage to find a pair "doon in Esh Winning", home of many of the performers). This was lovely stuff, right up to the twist ending, and if the interval had come at this point I might even have been feeling positive enough to stay on for the second half.

But first we had the story of Abraham and Isaac, constructed by author Toby Hulse from the words of children aged from three to seven, and performed by the Turrets youth theatre group. It didn't so much tell the story as meditate on it, and this threw up some interesting moments: I liked the idea that Abraham was called on to sacrifice Isaac - but that's what parents do, they make sacrifices. But this sort of clarity was lost in a morass of mime-type marching about with chairs (again, I had the sense of a struggle to fill the 20 minutes), and then, when we thought it was all over - and the audience had applauded - there was a coda in which the crucifixion was carried out in mime, just in case we hadn't caught the point that Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac prefigured the sacrifice of Jesus. Something about this play got under my skin and rubbed me raw (if you think this is better than indifference, you may count it as a success).

And it was a cold evening, and even the best folding chairs are not that comfortable, and - and rather than stay for another four plays, we came home. This may have been a mistake, we may have missed the best of it (and certainly Peter Lathan, reviewing for the British Theatre Guide, was overall more positive than I was) but I wasn't sorry. If the plays had been absolutely gripping, I might have put up with the discomfort; if I'd been warm and comfortable, or just following the plays round the city, I'd have been more indulgent about 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.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Bible stories simply don't matter to us in the way they mattered to our medieval ancestors. For them the Bible was a true history- with immediate relevance to their lives and after-lives; to us it's just a bunch of fairytales that most of us don't believe in, embodying a set of attitudes we mainly don't like. There's no urgent reason we should have a new set of mystery plays- our society doesn't demand it or need it, and so it's no surprise that the end product should be whimsical and incoherent.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Certainly this felt like an event that had been put together by a committee, not because it was the thing that any of the individual creators wanted to do, but because someone was prepared to fund an event that would appeal to someone else -

But then, that's how patronage has always worked.