PASSION PLAY

Martin Wainwright on playing a priest of the Sanhedrin one sunny day in April.

The curate at our new local church was a cunning young woman with a quick mind. When my teenage son and I turned up a little reluctantly in blankets to be shepherds in the annual Nativity play, she spotted that our cuddly-toy sheep were actually rabbits and amended the Gospel accordingly. Shortly afterwards, when one of the Wise Men models tumbled to the floor and its head broke off, she noted: “John the Baptist was there, too.”

In this merry vein, she came up to me over the mulled wine afterwards and said: “Your shepherd was absolutely excellent. I wonder if you might consider being in the Easter Passion play?” It is probably impossible to excel as a shepherd in a Crib service, but my head was duly turned. That is how I found myself in a much posher blanket a few months later, playing a priest of the Sanhedrin and denouncing Jesus in the market square at Woodstock in Oxfordshire.

It was a lovely sunny day in April and the two-hour cavalcade of the Passion story was great fun but also thought-provoking, a combination which goes back centuries to the development of medieval ‘Mysteries’ as both game and play designed to make solemn religion accessible. By the 13^th century, the walls of many English churches were already brightly painted with what amounted to theological comics, bringing countryside scenes together with wonderfully imaginative devils and dragons.

These drew on the more private exuberances of monkish illuminators of manuscripts which hardly any of the population knew how to read. The unknown muralists shared the cartoonish style of pre-Renaissance painting, inferior to the glories of Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo in artistic terms, but catching a look with a few deft strokes and drawing eyes as expressive as today’s emoji for ‘look’.

As a child in Leeds, I was encouraged to be proud that the most famous example of Mysteries in the United Kingdom at that time was held every four years just down the road in York. Whenever Dame Judi Dench comes up in conversation, I still swank that I spotted her in 1957 when as a local amateur she played the Virgin Mary. The cycle’s first recorded performance was in 1376, but its elaborate nature that year leaves no doubt that it dates back earlier and that extravagance and exuberance were already essential for its appeal.

They have remained so. The story of the Passion, and of the whole Bible story in the full Mystery cycle, has heart-stopping moments of genuine terror and grief; but the drama rolls along to a beat of contemporary references, informality and fun. It has often rolled along literally on ‘pageant wagons’, with each medieval trade guild using an elaborate cart, or today each local association decking out an open truck, to stage their allocated scene.

The bakers took on the Last Supper, the shipwrights or fishermen did Noah’s Ark and the Nailers supervised the Crucifixion. Inevitably, performances were inflated by the growth in the number of guilds − York has 48 playlets within the cycle – and their desire to outdo one another. In 1457 King Henry VI’s Queen Margaret complained after missing the final scene of Judgement and Doomsday presented by the Drapers at Coventry, because by then it was too dark.

Watching a Passion play is a memorable experience. When I took my own children to York, the Flood was unforgettably portrayed by scores of squealing unbelievers drowning by hoisting black and blue umbrellas which billowed about as angry waves. Taking part is something else again. In the early days, your email box fills up with messages such as “No Last Supper rehearsal – only one disciple can make it” and “Don’t wear trainers. They weren’t invented in Jesus’ time.” When we moved from a community hall into the street and shyly tried out our costumes, a delivery driver stuck between bollards was helped out by the head of Pontius Pilate’s guard, in full Roman legionary fig. It helped that this temporary soldier was himself a lorry driver by day.

We also had a teenage rock band singer playing Jesus, no easy role with a large wooden cross to lug through the streets to scoffs and jeers, and a former Conservative MP as a convincingly haughty Pilate. His contempt for the Sanhedrin and the mob was authentic, but a reminder that a story which means so much to devout Christians and moves others of different religions or none may also be offensive. We need no reminder about anti-Semitism. The violence of the Passion has also been an issue. And church authorities themselves have been alarmed at the energies their predecessors unleashed.

Like church wall paintings destroyed or covered with plaster in the Reformation, Passion plays and Mystery cycles were banned in the reign of Elizabeth I as potential encouragement for dissenting Catholics. They had been performed traditionally on the Feast of Corpus Christi, which went to the heart of the Catholic/Protestant schism over the nature of Communion. It has to be said that the ban was not very vigorously opposed, because staging the plays had become so expensive. But even in 1951 when the York cycle was revived, the Lord Chamberlain’s regulations forbade the playing of the Deity on stage; and the name of the professional actor who took the part was not credited in the programme.

Such troubles and traps were not ignored by our amateur band in Woodstock. Rather they were overcome by the evident sincerity and good nature of those involved, along with an intensive three months of making everyone in the small town aware of what was planned and why. One of my roles in this was to ask local shopkeepers for the unexpected favour of allowing Jesus to overturn a display stand of their goods on the pavement to illustrate the Gospel account of his clearing the temple of commercial stalls.

“Passion play? I still want to run a mile when I hear those words,” said the usually cosy owner of one of the main souvenir shops, from whom my wife and I had previously bought plenty of Christmas gifts and the like. No luck here, I thought. But then she revealed a knowledge of the plays which dwarfed mine because her mother was a professor of medieval history and one of the UK’s leading experts on the subject.

Hence the running a mile, no doubt after one too many childhood conversations or excursions. But she did the business and Jesus sent her knick-knacks flying with gusto.