7
March

Director, Gregory Thompson, on the revealing process of rehearsing A Satire of the Three Estates


Gregory Thompson, director of the productions this June, talks about his experience of working on the text for the first time and his realisation of the truly political nature of the play, saying that he recognised that this was as much a ”party political broadcast” as an entertainment.

The challenges of the play, according to Gregory, are its historic distance from us as well as the changing nature of theatre over time – now we see plays almost entirely as entertainment.  The other major difference is the play’s staging which is so remote from modern techniques.  Moreover, the shadow of Shakespeare looms large over sixteenth-century theatre in general, so zoning in on the peculiarly Scottish, as well as the pre-Shakespearean character of this play, will present a challenge.

Gregory also discusses the Interlude of 1540 – its separateness and its connectedness to the Satire.  Many of the entertaining digressions from the hard politics of the Satire are missing, giving the Interlude a sense of a being a “dramatized green paper”.  This could, of course, result from the fact that the only source we have for the Interlude, a letter from William Eure to Thomas Cromwell, necessarily emphasises the aspects of the drama that would have been interesting to the English King’s chief minister. Greg Walker has recently written about the differences between the two texts of the Satire and the Interlude and his paper will be uploaded to the website very soon.

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11
February

Gerry Mulgrew reads Folly’s sermon… and a diary of the rehearsal period

HolbeinFollyImage 1

For those of you interested in the sorts of discussions that occurred during the rehearsal period with Alison Peebles, Tam Dean Burn, Gerry Mulgrew and Gregory Thompson, today you’ll be able to find a diary in the documents section which reveals our preoccupations during that week in January.  Please do have a look and offer suggestions for any of the unanswered questions the readings provoked, the key ones being:

1. What are the differences between the 1540 and 1552/4 pieces, and between the Satire and other drama of the period?

2. What is the role of Diligence?

3. To modernise or not to modernise?

Rehearsal Diary

Here, also, is a video of Gerry Mulgrew reading out Folly’s sermon at the very end of the play.  As it says at the beginning of the rehearsal diary, this is where we started, because Gregory Thompson found it very strange that such an episode should happen after the seeming climax of the play – the enactment of the laws discussed by the parliament.  Yet Folly comes on and undermines this apparently ‘serious’ conclusion by delivering a speech which states ‘Stultorum numerus infinitus’ - the number of fools is infinite.  His monologue takes the form of a sermon joyeux, a mock-sermon delivered by someone who is not a preacher.  In it, he distributes a number of folly hats to society’s fools and his targets are merchants, old men who marry young girls, the clergy, and kings.  The section on kings moves his sermon from the general to the specific as he laments Scotland’s foreign policy and discusses current European conflicts.   He ends by invoking the souls of two contemporary court fools, Gilly‑mouband and ‘good Cacaphaty’, continuing to locate his words in the Scottish present.  The whole speech destabilises any tidy conclusion to the play by shifting responsibility back to the royal spectators and the audience themselves.

The image at the top of the page, incidentally,  is Holbein’s depiction of a fool’s sermon to an audience of fools from Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly.

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4
February

Gerry Mulgrew on A Satire of the Three Estates

Another treat from the recent script work undertaken with Scottish actors – this time an interview with legendary actor and theatre director, Gerry Mulgrew.  Having served as Artistic Director of touring theatre company Communicado for the last 30 years, if anyone can talk about the significance of the Satire for Scottish theatre history, it’s Gerry.

Of particular interest is his claim that the very local and seemingly historically specific concerns of the play in fact become “timeless and universal” because they concern the poor, social reform, and the corruption of the state – issues which still affect us today. He says that his prior belief that the play  was “stuffy” was challenged by the rehearsal process, and that the actors “have been rather impressed and surprised by how modern some of the ideas seem to be for the middle of the sixteenth century.  It is a great, passionate, humanist piece.”  Like Tam, Gerry picks up on the language of the play; both actors found Robert Burn’s poetry a useful gateway for undertanding it, although Gerry sees it as more of a challenge in terms of its orthography and rhythms.  But he also celebrates its uniqueness and its richness which he says produces a Scottish voice that is “glorious”.

Enjoy.

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28
January

Tam Dean Burn on A Satire of the Three Estates

We hit the ground running in 2013 with a series of production meetings at Stirling Castle followed by nine days of intensive script work with actors Alison Peebles, Gerry Mulgrew, Peter Kenny and Tam Dean Burn.  It was the first time we had really tackled the play in its full, rich, and complex entirety… more of which later.

In the meantime, here’s TV and film actor Tam Dean Burn talking stirringly about his experience of working on the text, with academics, and his thoughts on the Satire‘s themes and language.  (The above image is the view he mentions; the panorama of Arthur’s Seat and the Salisbury Crags from Greg Walker’s office window!)

 

 

 

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21
December

Who is John the Commonwealth?

highland

A central question the project will need to address in the New Year is the costuming and appearance of Satyre‘s characters.  Chief among these will be John the Commonwealth, and to do so, the team will first have to decide who, or even what, he is.  Information in the play is hardly indicative.  He bursts on to the stage much like the Pauper – “Out of my gate, for God’s sake let me ga!” (2422) – and yet does not suffer the abuse that Pauper does on the basis of his physical presentation, who is subjected to a litany of name-calling such as “False whoreson raggit carl” and told to leave “the field” (1946, 1939).  So is John not “raggit” then?  How does he demonstrate the necessary authority for Diligence to immediately smooth his path towards conference with the king (2434)?  A significant sartorial transformation occurs when his suggested reforms are passed by Parliament at the end of the play and he is absorbed into them – “Here shall they clothe John the Commonweal gorgeously, and set him down amang them in the Parliament” (3802 s.d.).  John now wears a “gay garmoon” but what did he wear before?

Jean E. Howard and Paul Strohm argue that John is the “indigenous voice of reform” in Ane Satyre and that both he and Pauper are “imagined from within, as internally self-regenerating forces”.  Does this direct us towards some sort of native tradition of Scotland – tartan, kilts. etc – or perhaps even a connection with nature?  John himself says that the commonwealth “want[s] clais” (2445).  As it’s embodiment, does John too? Perhaps he occupies a similar position to the wild man of prose romance on the border between society and the wilderness, his liminal energy informing his ability to tell truth to power.

As a representation of the ‘commonwealth’, Carol Edington has argued against situating John in terms of class, rank or occupation, writing:

As much psychological and political, the ideal of the commonweal conveyed very real feelings of organic unity, physical dynamism, and a very emotive patriotism,  Nowhere is this more vividly conveyed than in Lindsay’s dramatization of John the Commonweal.  It should perhaps be stressed at this point that the character of John, despite his often hungry and ragged appearance, was not a symbolic representation of “the poor” or even, more specifically, of the rural poor.  When Lindsay required such a figure he introduced the Pauper or the traditional “John Upland”.  John the Commonweal on the other hand represents the universal and public good of the entire community and not the interests of any single element.  He is the dramatic embodiment of a principle, not a party, an ideal and not an individual.                                                                                                              (p120, my itals)

It is certainly true that if John is clothed as a member of the Scottish citizenry then this will have a knock-on effect in terms of all of the represented social relationships in the play, something we should be very wary of.  But, for John to be “not an individual” is fine in theory, however theatre requires the practical expression of such interpretations.  If John embodies a principle then how can that principle in turn be embodied?  When the team gather at Stirling Castle early in 2013 to begin fixing aspects of the performance, such questions are sure to be hotly debated.

 

References:

Carol Edington, Court and Culture in Renaissance Scotland: Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, University of Massachusetts Press, 1994

Jean E. Howard and Paul Strohm, The Imaginary “Commons”, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 37.3, 2007

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2
November

Staging ‘Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis’

 

In June 2013, the full 5 hour version a Ane Pleasant Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis will be performed on the Peel at Linlithgow.

The research team gathered about a month into the project to discuss how this performance would be staged.  Initial thoughts had concerned a ‘horseshoe’ configuration; several platform stages set up in a semi-circle, with the audience arrayed before them and the east side of the Palace providing the backdrop to the action.  Such a configuration may well correlate to the 1554 performance of Satyre on the Greenside just outside Edinburgh.  While the specifics of the staging of this performance are unknown, the topography of the playing area involved a steep hill with a burn or drainage ditch running through it, faced by a gentler slope on the other side .  Sarah Carpenter suggests that the hill povided acoustic support for the actors playing in front of it, and that the audience were separated from the action by the burn – which is actually used during the performance – as they sat on the naturally ‘raked’ landscape behind it.  The effect would have been similar to an outdoor proscenium arch theatre.  The mode of staging during the 1554 performance was seemingly ‘place and scaffold‘ as certain main characters have named ‘seats’, meaning the rest of the characters would act in the undifferentiated area of the ‘feild’ mentioned during the play.

This configuration makes sense of the Greenside as a performance venue, but our ideas were adapted after several site visits and getting to know the grounds of Linlithgow a little better.  The action involving the burn (John the Commonwealth ‘loups’ or jumps it, the workmens’ wives wade through it, and the Pardoner’s relics are thrown into it) would not be able to be replicated at the Palace which is ‘ditch-free’, so other features of the text took prominence.   Paramount to Ane Satyre is the fact that key characters emerge from the audience; the Vices probably do in Part One, and John the Commonwealth and the Pauper certainly do in Part Two.  This is not uncommon for sixteenth century interludes.  Deriving from the morality play, a Vice’s entrance through the audience serves to remind them of how close they are sin and temptation.

In Satyre however, it is not only the Vices but the characters representative of the wider Scottish community who make their way to the stage via the audience.  We looked at the limited number of examples of late medieval staging that survive including The Castle of Perseverance, The Martyrdom of St Apollonia, and one found in the Térence des ducs manuscript.  All of these images showed some form of in-the-round staging.  The Térence des ducs image was especially helpful as the very top of it demonstrates an enclosed playing area, and you can actually see the back of audience’s heads in the foreground of this theatrical space.  While there is a wall rather than stages encircling this outdoor theatre (unlike the St Apollonia image), there is a central ‘scena’ – a pulpit-type area in which an actor is reading from a text – and costumed actors can be seen playing before it.

This set-up lends itself to the effect that we are trying to achieve with our audience; that they are auditors of a parliament whose decisions directly concern them, and that the speakers who represent their interests may be found among them.   By staging Satyre in-the-round, the world of the play collapses with the play in the world, helping to make relevant social issues which are remote in time, but which stand in for a whole host of issues faced by Scottish people today also trying to get their voice heard.  A crucial intervention to completely in-the-round staging was made by the team however, who thought that the area directly in front of the King should be cordoned off in some way, to demonstrate the inextricable nature of access to certain spaces and political authority or influence in the play.  There was also the decision taken, for reasons of audibility and visibility, that there should be a central, elevated stage in the middle of the playing area, in the vein the Castle of the Castle of Perseverance, or the ‘scena’ in the Térence des ducs image.

Consultation with personnel at Historic Scotland will decide whether this form of staging is feasible, but for now the project team are excited about the surrounding of audience with stages on the Peel, truly marking them out as a political as well as a theatrical community during the performance of Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis.

 

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