I pray you all, give your audience, and attend to this matter with reverence.’ Back in the day, if you wanted theatre your options were pretty limited. You could go and watch the mummers fumble their mixture of satire and pantomime, or you could go to a mystery play to be terrorised with hell and damnation and Bible stories. The Church certainly used to lay it on thick: the morality plays bring the Good News home with Avatar-like stage directions – the Virgin Mary ascending on a blazing aureole of light, and so forth – and ringing rhyming couplets full of sin and retribution.
But even Catholicism tends to use more carrot than stick these days, and the mystery plays begin to look decidedly dated. Most of us are nonplussed at the prospect of fiery torment, so what value do these pieces have now except as antiquarian curiosities? Well, that depends on how they are played.
New College have made a very credible job of The Somonyng of Everyman. Written around 1500, its couplets are full of Tudor vigour, and resound in the beautiful ante-chapel with clarity. The characters in this allegory are boldly drawn: George Hilton’s blind Death is straight out of Paradise Lost, and there is life enough in the supporting cast of faithless friends and fleeting virtues. On the whole the acting is off-the-peg rather than bespoke – Rory Smith’s Everyman could do with a bit more imagination – but it is tailored to a good pattern.
The aim is more to instruct than to entertain, but there are moments of real humour and poetic power. The satire on the Catholic priesthood may not be as sharp as some would like, but Everyman’s discovery of the weight of sin that cripples his Good Deeds is genuinely moving. Perhaps you even catch yourself looking into your own soul for an instant. Everyman’s message for a secular age is that integrity and goodness are the only things we can truly call our own, and this production delivers the moral well. This noblest of Punch-and-Judy shows is ably delivered in one of the stateliest settings in Oxford, and deserves your attention.
