Stanley Church presents Corpus Christi Plays
On Good Friday, (April 6), at 8 p.m., the Parish of Stanley will present Christ Before Annas and Caiaphas together with last year’s Death of Christ. Both are from the York Corpus Christi cycle. The complete presentation will take about one hour.
These plays developed from the tradition of liturgical drama, which began with simple additions to the service, spoken or sung, performed within the church. In the later 12th century, these grew too long and too boisterous, bursting out into the churchyard and finally into the surrounding city. By the 14th century, a complete cycle such as that performed at York included as many as 56 plays, requiring a full day or more to present and the sponsorship of all the major craft guilds.
The method of performance was remarkable. Each play was acted on a large wagon called a pageant, a kind of mobile playhouse. These pageants were initially marshaled in an open field known as Pageant Green, in the southwest corner of the city, before being drawn along to 12 different performance locations within York. At the crack of dawn, the first play in the cycle, The Fall of the Angels, was performed at the first station, before an audience seated in temporary scaffolding. Then The Fall of the Angels rolled on to the next station where another audience waited, and The Fall of Man, the second play, was performed in turn at the first station. Thus, each play was performed 12 times during the feast of Corpus Christi, as the pageants snaked through the city in a tightly regulated procession. This was a major undertaking, requiring considerable human and financial resources –– too much for a small rural parish!
Understandably, most contemporary revivals of the Corpus Christi cycles have been abbreviated, usually collapsing the broad scheme into a three-hour performance, although the full York cycle has been mounted very successfully in Toronto, taking nearly 18 hours to perform.
The Parish of Stanley present only two plays (with a combined length of about one hour), and, reversing the historical trend, the plays have placed them back inside the Church, in this case the handsome 19th-century timber-framed Saint Thomas Church in Stanley. The language of the plays is modernized to some extent, however the original and quite complex rhyme scheme is maintained, and as much of the alliterative pattern as possible was salvaged.
Most of the 2006 cast members of The Death of Christ will reprise their roles, and will be joined by other members of the parish.
