Wednesday evening. I left work early and after an hour and a half on the train I drove from the station northwards into the heart of the county, to the county town itself. The day had been hot and sunny, and the heat lingered into the evening, so that the drive was uncomfortable (dust whenever I opened the window, dazzle from the bright light, heavy traffic on the roads).
The county town is actually a small city, originally a Roman foundation. It is dominated by what appears to be an extinct volcano which is capped by a vast medieval cathedral - one of the finest in Europe (some would say it is the finest, perfect beyond comparison). The town is divided into two parts - the workaday manufacturing town at the base of the volcano and the clerical settlement on the hilltop.
Arriving in the city, I drove through the lower town, all terraces and Victorian warehouses. Through the commuter traffic of people going home. Then in a rush up the steep volcano side, low gear all the way until the hilltop.
I parked by an old pub. The time was 6.30. I walked towards the cathedral.
I was early (overcompensating as usual) and so I walked around the cathedral close, which encompasses almost the entire hilltop. Hundreds of people live in this huge area and are attached to the cathedral and its associated institutions (faith schools, clerical administrations, the bishop’s palace etc). The architecture is a jumble of styles, from medieval to Edwardian, laid out in cobbled little courts and side alleys that fill the space between the glacial gothic purity of the cathedral and the edge of the hill (there is definitely an edge - it falls sheer in some places).
Mellow stone garden walls (just high enough that you can’t look over), beautifully-kept expanses of lawn, glimpses of sedate still interiors seen through casement windows, sash windows, tiny leaded windows.
The sky was cerulean blue (or pantone 15-4020 TC if you prefer). The heat of the day, that had been oppressive in the town below, was relived by a steady warm wind that (in my imagination) seemed to blow all the way from Provence to dispel some of the Barchester-laden high-minded seriousness of the place. I was almost alone in the close, walking up and down the lawns, glad to be in the open air after the sticky train journey and frustrating drive.
Most beguiling of all was the effect the evening sun had on the greenery of the hilltop (trees, shrubs, lawns - all clipped and shaped and kept in place). The sunshine, falling at an oblique angle, lighted all the leaves and blades of grass so that not only were the multifarious shades of green made glossy with the light, but they were also given a deep intense shadow that made every tiny detail stand out. I had never seen this effect before - the whole of the landscape-townscape of the hill acquired a deeper perspective (and so assumed a greater significance).
A steady stream of people began to walk through the close, and I followed them to a side entrance and into the gloomy ten-sided Chapter House. There I met someone whom I have agreed not to mention in this weblog. Gradually more and more people arrived for a performance of the cathedral’s Mystery Play.
We had to wait in the Chapter House about thirty minutes. To entertain us a choir of ten people sang madrigals (they sang so perfectly it was as if someone was playing a CD). We looked through notices about Anglican culture (singing groups, poetry readings, talks, workshops, lectures, specialist exhibitions - this is the Anglican culture sneered at by Ruth Gledhill, jeered at by Melanie McDonagh and generally lampooned by News International).
At 7.30 we were guided into the cathedral cloisters where an open-air theatre had been set up. As we filed into the central area a plethora of ushers warned us (in the interests of health and safety) not to trip over the graves that dotted the grass. About two hundred people were in the audience, and we took our seat in tiers that filled about half of the cloister square.
Mystery Plays are religious interpretations of Bible stories that date from the 10th century. Possibly the best known is the Oberammergau passion play in Germany. In England there are four distinct texts that preserve the Mystery “cycles” - short ten-minute productions that together tell the story of the world from Creation to the Day of Judgement in a performance that lasts two to three hours.
In the medieval period each of the episodes in the cycle was performed by one of the city’s trade guilds (which were also quasi-religious fraternities). The productions were delivered in the open air on carts rather like modern carnival floats. Sir James Frazer has written about the anthropological importance of mystery plays in
The Golden Bough (unexpurgated version).
Our seats were in the second row, to the right of the cloister (as you faced the stage). The performance of the mystery play opened with the entire cast chanting and singing. The plays were interrupted by the bells in the cathedral’s central tower tolling every quarter, and a raven kept up a noisy racket throughout.
You couldn’t judge the acting too seriously - this was amateur dramatics (the plays would always have been performed by amateurs, over the past thousand years). A band played medieval instrument (trumpets, drums, weird oboe-like pipes). Folk songs from the county were sung, sometimes with new words.
The twenty-one different plays included shepherd’s dances, tunes revived from ancient manuscripts, Latin phrases pronounced phonetically in the county accent. The language was archaic but no more difficult than Shakespeare, including rhyming sequences. This production revived the guild banners, which changed with each of the plays.
In the interval we went back into the Chapter House to drink tea served in Styrofoam cups. The evening was warm so we didn’t need the blankets on hire for 50p. It was a long production, but worth going to see.
