FT264

“In Cathedral Provost may ponder if he should unbar the Great Door
With a wink and a nod to the Glory of God in the guise of an unredeemed Whore”

You don’t usually see Satan and his minions running up and down the aisle of an ancient cathedral, or hear praise for the comfort given by a whore.

But this was a mystery play in Southwark Cathedral, just across the road from London Bridge railway station.

The York and Chester mystery plays, revived during the 1951 Festival of Britain, are mediæval, but The Southwark Mysteries is only a decade old; its first performance was part of the millennium celebrations and its second was at the end of April this year. Written by local poet and playwright John Constable, its drama, songs and poems draw on the history and mythology of Southwark.

On the south bank of the Thames, Southwark was outside the mediæval City of London, with all its laws and prescriptions. Its freedom from these laws was known as “the Liberty of the Clink”; here were theatres, taverns and stews (brothels) aplenty.

Southwark’s whores are central to the mystery play. Mediæval Southwark came under the authority of the Bishop of Winchester, whose 12th-century palace was near what is now the cathedral, and for centuries he licensed the whores, known as the Winchester Geese.

The Tudor historian John Stow wrote that “[T]hese single women were for­bidden the rites of the church, so long as they continued that sinful life, and were excluded from Christian burial, if they were not reconciled before their death. And therefore there was a plot of ground called the Single Woman’s churchyard, appointed for them far from the parish church.” [1]

An early 19th-century source confirms: “There is an unconsecrated burial ground known as the Cross Bones at the corner of Redcross Street, formerly called the Single Woman’s burial ground, which is said to have been used for this purpose.” [2] John Constable holds a vigil every month at the gates of a small patch of wasteland between office blocks on what is now Redcross Way. Thousands of prostitutes and paupers are buried there; a bronze plaque on the gates commemorates “The Outcast Dead”.

In 1996 Constable, whose previous work includes a stage adaptation of Mervyn Peake’s Gormen­ghast and BBC radio adapt­ations of John Wyndham novels, began writing a series of mystical poems inspired by one of the Winchester Geese buried in Crossbones Graveyard.

“The poems have informed all the work at Crossbones; they were the origin­als,” he told me. “When I came to write The Southwark Mysteries, to begin with I didn’t have mediæval mystery plays or Christianity in mind at all. I didn’t have an agenda. When the Goose came to me she wanted to tell her story, and all I did was write it down, and then try to understand what it meant.”

Traditionally, mystery plays retell Bible stories and Christian moral teachings through mini-pageants, bringing often complex religious concepts to the masses through entertainment. “The Mysteries are a unique element of English literary inheritance,” the Very Rev Colin Slee, Dean of Southwark Cathedral, told me.

When the idea of turning his cycle of poems about Southwark and the Winchester Geese into a Mystery Play came to John Constable, he turned to the Dean (then called the Provost of the Cathedral) for help. Colin Slee told him to look at the tradition in the literary genre: “Mystery Plays are about the ‘mysteries’ of revelation in Holy Scripture, the themes of life and death, sin and redemption, the birth, death and resurrection of Christ are central; the plays were always a vernacular explor­ation teaching these great themes of Christian faith.”

Playwright and priest worked well together.

“Colin was very keen to get me as close into the traditional framework as possible,” said Constable. “The Creation, Adam and Eve, the Flood… Colin did actually give me a list of the things he would expect in a mystery play. It was an interesting balance. On the one hand, I made a big effort to say, this isn’t something I’m just conceiving in some sort of abstract way; it’s written itself, and this is what it is; but that said, in writing the mystery play, with Colin’s influence – and Canon Jeffrey John was another advisor – they really gave me the theo­logy, which I was very keen to embrace, to learn as much as possible.

“There are Pagans who suspect that I’m a sort of crypto-Christian, and equally some in the Church who see me as this Pagan who’s trying to bring Paganism into the Church, and actually I think they’re both right, but equally neither is right. I’ve always believed that the outer forms, when they harden into belief, are actually a great prison for the human spirit.”

In the tradition of mystery plays, The Southwark Mysteries had a huge amateur cast recruited from the local community, including children from three local primary schools playing Cromwell’s soldiers, with colanders on their heads and roasting tins on their chests; only nine lead roles were played by professional actors. Two historical characters, Moll Cutpurse (Caroline Garland), a 17th-century pipe-smoking, cross-dressing pickpocket with a Sarf Landan accent to kill for, and the 16th-century ‘Water Poet’ John Taylor (Kai Simmons) provided the colourful explanatory chorus. Jesus (Merryn Owen) and Satan (Daniel Copeland) argued passionately over the fate of souls; Jesus was dressed in T-shirt and jeans, representing Everyman.

This is vital to the play, the writer told me. “At his entrance, everyone is singing ‘He is come’ and looking up for him to descend from Heaven, while the ‘Son of Man in the street’ wheels in his bike through a side aisle, unnoticed.” Late in the play, there is a scene based on Jesus’s words: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me”. [3] “Jesus’s last words to the ‘Blessed’ and ‘Dead Souls’ emphasise that true Christian work is not preaching or judging others but recognising the Divine in all Humanity, serving Christ in brother and sister man,” said Constable.

The play was put together in just eight weeks from start to finish, with the commun­ity cast attending workshops twice a week. Only the professional actors and a tiny production staff were paid. The sponsors included Southwark Council and the National Lottery, and much of the sponsorship was in kind – the South Bank University, for example, gave both funding and rehearsal rooms free of charge. Director Sarah Davey-Hull held all of this together for the second time; she also directed the first performance in 2000.

The whole thing was glorious, at times manic – and in places incredibly touching, as when the Goose, played with cheerful warmth throughout by Michelle Watson, sadly cradles the dead Jesus in a beautiful Pièta.

I bumped into local MP Simon Hughes after the performance, taking a night off from the General Election campaign. One of the patrons of The Southwark Mysteries, he had originally called it “the jewel in the crown” of Southwark’s mill­ennium celebrations, and it was his sugg­estion to put it on again 10 years later, like the Ober­ammergau Passion Play. “My excitement at the idea of another production this year was entirely justified by the dramatic, moving and spectacular performance,” he told me. “This year’s performance of The Southwark Mysteries was so confident and such fun that we are on the verge of creating a new tradition.”
With all the emphasis on prostitutes, there’s a delightful earthiness and bawdi­ness running through the story. I asked the Dean how he felt about that.

“Mystery plays have always been very ‘earthed’ in the local community. ‘Bawdiness’ might not be the appropriate description always but, yes, it is intrinsic to the nature of such performances which always used local people and local issues as subject matter,” he said.

A traditional scene in mystery plays is the Harrowing of Hell, when Jesus, after his crucifixion, frees the bound souls. The Devil and Jesus argue over the souls in an astonishing mixture of theology and ribaldry.

Satan: “Oh no! I will not budge from what Levi’s law permits.”
Jesus: “Who are you to judge what they do with their bits?”

The Devil is determined he will get the Goose.

Satan: “Ha! But you cannot deny me this whore
Tonight in Hell this Goose shall roast
No wicked Witch ever sinned more.”
Jesus: “She never blasphemed the Holy Ghost.
She is the keeper of my secret door.”
Satan: “I grant you, she let in more men than most,
And now it’s my turn to give her what for.”
Jesus: “Ha! The horny man and his hollow boast!”

Jesus wins the argument through redemption:

Satan: “Who would want such a pearl, foul’d and fester’d in Thames mud?”
Jesus: “I would want such a pearl, it is washed clean with my blood.”

And there is a beautiful exchange between Jesus and the Goose.

Jesus: “In Southwark I find me my Winchester Goose.
With my blood she was bought as in flesh she was framed.”
Goose: “By the curlies and short Men had me in your Name.” [4]

At the very end of the play, all the characters call out: “Let in, let in.” John Constable explained: “One of the central images of the entire Southwark Mysteries is to recreate the connection between the Crossbones and the Cathedral, and in a sense to let the spirit of Crossbones into the Cathedral – this image at the end, ‘Let in, let in’, it’s the Cathedral finally receiving the Goose back in.

“The image I had, which we’re not quite ready for yet, back in millennium year I wanted to bring all the prostitutes of London into the church and have them all kneel before the priests to ask their forgiveness; I wanted then the priests and bishop to give forgiveness; and then I wanted everybody to reverse, and all the priests would kneel and the prostitutes would forgive them.”

Maybe in another 10 years’ time…



Notes
1 John Stow: A Survey of London, 1603.
2 W Taylor: Annals of St Mary Overy, 1833.
3 Matthew 25:40, and the reverse in Matthew 25:45.
4 John Constable: The Southwark Mysteries, Oberon Books, 1999.