Theatre History, Theatrical Mimesis, and the Myth of the Abydos Passion Play

The impetus for this essay came from my recent charge to write comprehensive exam questions for one of our Ph.D. candidates here at Louisiana State University. I wanted to write a question on the origins of theatrical practice, but I thought about veering—both culturally and historically—from ancient Athens, the usual locus for speculation on theatre origin theories. After a quick review of suitable source materials, I devised the following question: “What was the Abydos Passion Play? Discuss its content and principal characteristics in context of its production history.” It is, admittedly, a challenging question for a Ph.D. candidate, and probably for many credentialed theatre scholars. Still, after composing the question, I decided to try composing a response, one suitable for our “short-answer” exam format: “The Abydos Passion Play is the name given to an event staged during the annual Khoiak festival in the ancient Egyptian city of Abydos. Evidence for this event is found on a stela, or inscribed stone memorial slab, erected by the courtier Ikhernofret during the Middle Kingdom, circa the nineteenth century BCE; but the event was likely staged for many centuries both before and after the dedication of the stela itself. The event commemorated the mythical death and resurrection of Osiris, god of the afterlife, and scholars of the source material claim that it exhibited many elements that we recognize today as theatrical.”

I realize that my sample response is quite short, even for a “short-answer” exam, but its brevity is due to the fact that I have supplied nearly all there is to say with certainty about the event called the Abydos Passion Play. I set aside my sample question for the upcoming exam, but I continued to query myself about my drive to develop such a question in the first place, and to query the field of theatre studies about the position of the Passion Play within the discipline. And indeed, after some reflection on the so-named Ikhernofret Stela, the event recorded there, and the specific cultural contexts for them both, I have come to question the designation of the event as a “play” and the stela as a document of “theatrical” practice. Still, I have also come to believe that the Passion Play has an important role in theatre studies: It prompts us to revisit the use of terms most basic to our discipline, as well as the borders that delimit the practices falling within its purview. In other words, rather than undermining our disciplinary claim to archive and investigate the Passion Play, I seek instead to re-think the sort of claim that we might make of it.

Certainly the event described by the Ikhernofret Stela already holds a prominent, if ambiguous, place in narratives on the origin and history of the theatre. Consider these accounts of the event from three popular theatre history textbooks. The tenth edition of Brockett and Hildy’s History of the Theatre remarks that calling the event a Passion Play “deliberately links it to a European religious drama of the Middle Ages” but notes that scholars are divided as to whether it more closely resembled a public spectacle or a royal funeral. In conclusion, the textbook reports that “information sufficient to resolve the dispute is not presently available, although all apparently agree that some sort of performative event took place.” The sixth edition of Wilson and Goldfarb’s Living Theatre calls this event the Abydos Ritual, in deference to the religious aspects of the Ikhernofret Stela, but states that “it is clear from this account that the ceremony had unmistakable theatrical elements: people played the roles of characters in the story and acted out episodes from the life of Osiris.” Finally, the first edition of Zarrilli, McConachie, Williams, and Sorgenfrei’s Theatre Histories concedes scarce knowledge of this event, noting that “the little that is known to us of this quasi-dramatic commemorative ritual is the information inscribed on a single stele,” but offers Ikhernofret performance credit by calling him “both overseer of the ceremonies and a participant/actor playing the role...