A guest post by Joao Curti
For our final assignment in Early Drama, we were tasked with carrying out a project on any topic of our choosing relating to the module. Therefore, myself and a fellow student, M.H. Orchard, decided to write an original morality play for a twenty-first century audience. Our aim was to answer the question – are [traditional] morality plays still relevant to society today? – by exploring traditional dramatic conventions found in Medieval morality plays. Orchard and I decided to call our play StudentKind. The play follows Eve, a girl just beginning university during her first term as she explores her new life and the people around her, interacting with a mix of Vice (drugs, lust, sloth) and Virtuous (mindfulness) characters.
For myself, the main area of interest in this project lay in constructing an actor-audience relationship; as I discussed in an essay for the project, we designed StudentKind to be performed in a commercial theatre. It is conventional for the boundaries between performers and audiences to be more apparent in commercial theatres today than in the Medieval period when theatres and playhouses still were not around, i.e. performers are more likely to stay within the platea, the area of performance, and not cross into the locus, where the audience are situated (of course this separation is not necessarily a standardised rule, but a common norm). Research into locus and platea lead me to an essay by Clare Wright, in which she argues:
the human body is at the centre of both production and experience of space and at the heart of the dramatic medium […] consis[ting] of the corporeal communication and interaction between the bodies of a performer and his audience. 1
During the performances of a traditional morality play, the boundaries of locus and platea are crossed; the close proximity of an actor to their audience blur the lines of performance and reality. So, how do you build an actor-audience relationship, whilst keeping up the division locus and platea commonly found in commercial theatre? As Wright has declared, the answer lies within ‘corporeal communication’. 2 Take, for example, the penultimate scene of StudentKind where Blake (the Virtuous character) uses the psychological concept mindfulness to help Eve – ‘[Blake sits] down on the chair, at an angle now faced more towards the audience as well as Eve’. Scenes of agnorosis are crucial in morality plays as they allow drama to heighten through emotion, which allowed us to build off the idea of ‘mirror neurons’; as Stephen Purcell explains, in their cognitive approach to theatre, Gallese et al. suggest that through observing actions we learn to perform them and ‘embody other people’s emotional behaviour’,3 and we are better able to empathise with the characters of a play. The characters have been positioned on stage to allow the audience a chance to listen to Blake and take heed of his words as Eve will do; Blake in ‘taking [Eve’s] hand in his’ builds a metaphorical bridge between the performer and their audience. Eve is positioned to represent the audience, so the physical act of hand holding allows a member of the audience to feel as if the actor is specifically speaking to them as an individual. If we consider the concept of mirror neurons, audiences will either be able to empathise with Eve (feeling her sense of regret and need to re-evaluate her life choices) or identify with Blake’s helping nature.
To put it simply, I believe morality plays are still relevant to audiences today. However, most traditional morality plays are very outdated, allowing the need for new plays. What we can do is learn from traditional plays – how views on themes have changed; using effective staging practices found in traditional morality plays; trying to reach wider audiences through a universal character; and much more. As you can see, I have only discussed with you one aspect of the project that Orchard and I carried out, pulling on a range of sources. The most effective sources at our disposal were, of course, Mankind, Everyman and The Interlude of Youth; we cultivated as much as we could from these plays to apply their techniques into our own creation and research.
Obviously, there is still so much left to explore.
Joao Curti is an undergraduate student in the University of Kent’s School of English, studying English and American Literature with Creative Writing.
End Notes:
[1] Clare Wright, Sound, body and space: audience experience in late medieval English drama. PhD thesis (The Nottingham ePrints service: The University of Nottingham, 2011), p. 3.
[2] Wright, p. 3.
[3] Stephen Purcell, Shakespeare & Audience in Practice (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 40.
Further Reading:
Beadle, Richard and Fletcher, Alan J. (editors), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, 2nd edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Escolme, Bridget, Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, performance, self (Oxon: Routledge, 2005).
Happé, Peter, Medieval English Drama: A Casebook (London: The Macmillan Press LTD, 1984).
Happé, Peter, English Drama Before Shakespeare (New York: Longman, 1999).
Fitzgerald, Christina M. and Sebastian, John T. (editors), ‘Mankind’, The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2013), pp. 356-375.
Fitzgerald, Christina M. and Sebastian, John T. (editors), ‘Everyman’, The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2013), pp. 378-390.
Fitzgerald, Christina M. and Sebastian, John T. (editors), ‘The Interlude of Youth’, The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2013), pp. 436-448.
Potter, Robert, The English Morality Play (London: Routledge, 1975).