I was recently lucky enough to play a small role in PLS's
production of the Conversion of St. Paul (from the Digby MS). And wanted
to note a couple things which drew my attention in the staging and performance
of the play. We performed it 6 times, 3 times at Colgate University, and
3 times here in Toronto. While at Colgate we had a large rectangular hall,
here in Toronto we used Alumi Hall & the Foyer of Old Vic. In both cases
the audience processed, which was quite interesting to see. At Colgate,
Jerusalem was at one end, Damascus at the other. The conversion
happened in the middle of the audience (well to one side of them),
with audience members withing a couple feet of the being converted Saul.
Here in Toronto, Jerusalem was in Alumni Hall, and Damascus inthe foyer
(of old vic). The audienced processed out of the one room into the (large)
foyer, there the conversion, and Damascus scenes took place. I know
that some members of the audience had trouble seeing at some points,
impervious to the efforts of crowd control by Profesor Johnston and
others. I'm convinced that Medieval and Renaissance audiences must
have relocated themselves more intelligently. One professor of mine
complained that he had missed the conversion scene completely, because
he was at the back.
In my role as one of the knights I was pulling the horse, and always
delighted that the audience would intuitive know to get out of the way
when I started walking backwards into them with a horse. (or large
replica thereof.) We were instructed by the directory (Kim Yates) to
use every opportunity to break the '4th wall' by going through the
audience. They would always seperate to give us enough room. In
regards to the horse, it was such an attention-getter that the
manuscript direction for Saul to ride out and about the place began to
make complete sense. It was necessary to do this. Otherwise the
audience would stare dumbly at the cute horse, completely oblivious to
the speeches of Caiaphas and Anna (and in our staging their subsequent
dance).
The play was accompanied at times for the dances by
Renaissance flute, tambourine, and positive organ. At the end as
Poeta exclaims "to whose laud we sing Exultet Caelum Laudibus" we all
processed in singing the hymn in question. While it had it's high
points (getting to arrest and drag around a manicled Saul) and it's
low points (Never did get my character 'macho' enough) I thoroughly
enjoyed working with the play, and learned a lot about the
possibilities for staging and performances of early dramatic texts. I
just thought some of you may have liked to hear about how we staged
it, since the staging has been debated a number of times. It works
well as a processional type of play, even though modern audiences
aren't expecting it. As well, due to the lengths of speechs, the
Damascus and Jerusalem sets appear to need a fair bit of distance
between them. Only once or so did we arrive late at the conversion
(explosion) spot. Normally we seemed to arrive early.
Back to essay-writing,
James Cummings
[log in to unmask] | 1994: Official Year of The Toronto Free-Net.
