Transformations in Biblical Literary Traditions: Incarnation, Narrative, and Ethics--Essays in Honor of David Lyle Jeffrey

Chapter 11: Medieval Biblical Drama in Post-Apartheid South Africa: The Chester Plays in Afterlife

      Medieval Biblical Drama in Post-Apartheid South Africa The Chester Plays in Afterlife Theresa Coletti In the late 1990s Mark Dornford-May and Charles Hazelwood, artistic and musical directors, respectively, of London’s Broomhill Opera, went to South Africa with the goal of forming an indigenous theatrical company. Under the auspices of the South African Academy of the Performing Arts, Dornford-May and Hazelwood auditioned nearly two thousand people from across rural and urban SouthAfrica.1 For its first production,the multiracial , multiethnic, and multilingual company created from this effort— Dimpho Di Kopane (DDK), which means“combined talents”in Sotho— adapted and produced the medieval English biblical history of the world plays known as the Chester cycle. The Mysteries, or Yiimimangaliso in Zulu, debuted at the Spier Festival in Stellenbosch, South Africa, in December 2000. In 2001 Dornford-May and Hazelwood brought The Mysteries to London, where the show played, with increasing acclaim, to audiences at Wilton’s Music Hall and then at Queen’s Theater in the West End; there268 Medieval Biblical Drama in Post-Apartheid South Africa 269 after, The Mysteries toured internationally, including performances in New York in 2002 and 2004. This vibrant instance of cross-cultural performance raises important questions about the politics of postcolonial theater, the function of performance in such contexts, and the afterlives of medieval biblical drama in the postmedieval world. In turning to Chester’s early dramatic traditions as a primary resource for their fledgling company, Dornford-May and Hazelwood established the signature of that company’s emergent repertoire: Dimpho Di Kopane would become known for its reinvention of other Western classics such as The Magic Flute, The Beggar’s Opera, Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, and Bizet’s Carmen.2 But the choice of medieval biblical drama bears more directly on the particular circumstances of DDK’s foundation and the aims of its initial production. Dornford-May reports that he and Hazelwood settled on Chester’s cycle of biblical plays as theatrical material because the familiarity of the biblical story provided a“common starting point” that could unify members of the company and be accessible to its audiences.3 Like Chester’s medieval plays, DDK’s Yiimimangaliso was largely the endeavor of amateurs whose performance would be deeply tied to the experiences, images, and values of their local communities. But it also worked enormous changes on its medieval material, transforming Chester’s early drama into musical theater. The production’s musical score drew eclectically from ancient and modern,indigenous and imported South African sources; its percussive instrumentation was provided by “found” objects: dustbins standing in for drums, rubber tubing for the clarinet.4 Reviewing Yiimimangaliso for the London Times, Benedict Nightingale described the music as originating“partly from an African village,partly from a Pentecostal church, and partly from a medieval cathedral.”5 This essay analyzes the version of The Mysteries that Dornford-May and Hazelwood first developed in South Africa and then transported to the London stage—the production that put DDK on the theatrical map. I choose this version not simply because the principal resource for my analysis is the 2001 video recording of a live performance at Wilton’s Music Hall,6 but more important because I want to explore how The Mysteries enacted confluences of theater, politics, and religion for its young South African company at a particular moment in the history of a young country coming to terms with a long legacy of colonial oppression and racial segregation. What can medieval English theatrical traditions offer to a community of performers thus situated? How might the South African play’s creative reclamation of the medieval dramatic artifact illuminate prior traditions of the biblical theater that they simultaneously embrace and transform? This raises the perennial question, How is the Bible itself a crucial point of contact and difference between peoples and cultures vastly separated by geography and time? I Approaching the South African Mysteries as evidence of the long afterlife of medieval English biblical theater requires some unpacking of the very terms of this relationship: medieval, English, biblical, theater.7 Although the scholarly community of late has increasingly submitted for scrutiny categories of the “medieval” and the “Middle Ages,” the idea of the medieval that attended the development of Yiimimangaliso has little to do with historical research or reflections on periodization, medievalism, and the oftcited otherness of the medieval world.8...