# Séminaire The Past is Back

Marianne Drugeon

## INTRODUCTION: HISTORY PLAYS AND POLITICS

As a specialist of politically committed theatre I have constantly been studying the complex relationship between theatre and history: theatre, as a pulpit, often turns into a tool which playwrights use to force spectators to think about the present (why have you voted for Brexit? What can we do to help migrants?), but it is also very efficient at putting the present in perspective (Is Brexit the result of a mistrust of European policies, or a mistrust of British policies? What are the reasons for these waves of migration, what have been the roles of Western Nations?). Playwrights use the stage to convince, to debate, to teach, to question...

Theatre is also good at telling stories and History plays have always been popular. Alongside tragedy and comedy, history is one of the three main genres in Western theatre. It emerged as a distinct genre from tragedy in Renaissance England (cf Shakespeare's History plays). From the start, history plays have helped the nation to define its own identity. Thus Ralph Hertel explains how its rise in the Early Modern period corresponds to a growing sense of English national identity under the early Tudors: "*Englishness is considered as something brought forth by the spectators who participate in the theatre event by becoming eye witnesses of sorts of the events staged and who engage in the Englishness displayed theatrically*<fnref n="1" />."

This quote also underlines another reason why theatre is particularly apt, as an artistic form, to tackle history: the connection with the audience is direct, the debate is made possible live (cf plays where the audience is asked questions such as "What would you do if you were in their shoes", with possible votes). That relation with the audience is obviously very different when the play is created on a stage in front of an audience (thrust stages, proscenium stages), or when it is environmental theatre (using the particular architecture of a space which is not meant for theatre and intermingling the audience space and the performance space) or promenade theatre (with multiple-focus action and a moving audience, so that the standing audience intermingles with the performance). The two last forms are going to involve the audience much more, by definition.

Whatever the choices made by committed playwrights today, many of those possible spatial organisations are inspired by Elizabethan theatres, precisely because they created a particular

<footnote n="1">¹ Hertel, Ralf. *Staging England in the Elizabethan History Play: Performing National Identity*. Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2014, 1.</footnote>
relationship between the audience and the stage which was not based on an attempt at verisimilitude: it is often much more interesting to engage with the spectators over one's interpretation of the past, rather than to merely show them that interpretation, because it concretely emphasizes the links between the past and the present. If the spectators identify with the historical characters, they will connect the situation that those characters live with their own situation in the present of the performance.

# I. MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ENGLAND ON THE CONTEMPORARY STAGE

## 1. Two cases in point (Edgar and Brenton)

Working on politically-committed playwrights on the contemporary British stage I was struck by how recurrent Early modern and medieval England were, both as an endless source of stories and because those periods saw the emergence of forms which were a constant source of inspiration.

In 2011, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, two very famous politically-committed playwrights, members of the Wild Bunch, a group of playwrights belonging to the same generation (Steven Berkoff, Howard Brenton, David Edgar, Trevor Griffiths and David Hare), who both began writing for the stage in the 1970s and often worked together, wrote two plays linked with the period: David Edgar wrote *Written on the Heart*, a very thorough and intellectually challenging play about the debates surrounding the translation of the bible into English. The cover of the published text announces an “enthralling historical drama”, commissioned by the RSC. It was performed in Stratford-upon Avon at the Swan Theatre.

Around the same period, Howard Brenton wrote *Anne Boleyn* for the Globe Theatre, which is described, once more in the cover of the published book, as “a celebration of a great English heroine”.

In the first case “serious” drama in a publicly-funded performing arts venue, in the second a perhaps more “entertaining” play devised for the more varied audience of a private theatre. BUT in both cases the venues chosen explicitly announce a link with the Elizabethan period, and in both cases the playwrights who were commissioned are known for their political commitment to the ideals of the left.

This was for me a starting point:
Why are playwrights who profess an interest for the political and social situation of their contemporary world, regularly setting their plays in the distant past? Brenton became famous for *Romans in Britain* (1980), commenting on British imperialism through the depiction of the invasion of Britain by the Romans. He also wrote *Danton's Death* (1982), set during the French Revolution, or *55 Days* (2012) centred on the trial and execution of Charles I.

David Edgar wrote *O Fair Jerusalem* (1975) set alternately in 1948 and in 1348, and many rewritings of Shakespeare's plays: *Death Story* (1972), an adaptation of *Romeo and Juliet*, or *Dick Deterred* (1974) an adaptation of *Richard 3* with Nixon pleading that he is ready to give up his "kingdom for a scapegoat".

If Shakespeare is understandably an unavoidable reference for any playwright writing in English, in the case of those adaptations, the point was political and not stylistic (*Death Story* is transposed in Belfast in the 1970s, *Dick Deterred* is about the Watergate). So I set out to research the way the two periods, broadly speaking Early Modern and Medieval England on the one hand and the 20th and 21st centuries on the other, could interact sufficiently for political playwrights to decide that setting their plays centuries apart could help spectators to better understand the present.

## 2. The Conference

The result was a two-day conference in May 2017, organized along two lines: while many have already looked at the way Shakespeare is being adapted, updated or revisited if not rewritten for contemporary audiences, my wish was to explore the dialectics between past and present from many different perspectives, with one constant object in mind, the assessment of the political impact of such work. The conference was therefore divided in two parts. One was devoted to Shakespeare on the contemporary stage, whether his plays were adapted for special kinds of audiences (for instance young audiences), rewritten by contemporary playwrights (Koltès, Osofisan), or staged differently by contemporary companies in avowedly presentist adaptations (ie introducting present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past).

The second part was exploring how contemporary artists pictured that past in particular, on the stage but also in TV series, as serious drama or satirical musicals, not only setting plays in that period but also using the forms developed in that period.
What I was **not** interested in was costume drama, what I was interested in was why Anne Boleyn or Thomas Cromwell, or Thomas More were used by playwrights to not only tell the story of the past but also explain the present. Indeed, telling History always has a creative dimension, and because there is no way simply to reconstruct “THE truth” without interpretation, our versions of history, our stories, are always influenced by the context in which the “historian” lives: they inevitably represent the historian’s situation in the present as well as his or her best attempt objectively to reconstruct the past. We could perhaps even go as far as saying that our way of representing the past tells more about our way of understanding the present.

What is more, I was also interested in the modern use of medieval forms of theatre, like mystery plays, and I discovered a contemporary form which I would say is very much influenced by medieval forms, the community play.

Indeed the first day ended with a talk entitled “Walking with Ghosts”, given by David Edgar and Stephanie Dale, who collaborated on a community play entitled *A Time to Keep* which was created in Dorchester in 2007.

## II. COMMUNITY PLAYS

A few words about Community Plays: Ann Jellicoe, a professional playwright and theatre director, left the bustle of London and decided to settle in West Dorset in the late 1970s. She started to write a play for the local school, but she wrote on such a large scale that it became necessary to involve not only the children but also the wider community. The experience was a huge success: Jon Oram, artistic director who has started working with Ann Jellicoe and is now a specialist of that form, explains: “**the more that people were asked for help, the greater became the interest in what was happening. The greater the interest, the more people helped, and commitment grew. An amazing energy emerged: long-lost feelings of belonging to a place and a community began to surface**<fnref n="2" />.”

Since this first experience, Dorchester has seen 6 community plays, and Jon Oram has developed the genre throughout the United Kingdom, but also in Continental Europe and North America.

<footnote n="2">² Jon Oram, Afterword to *A Time to Keep*. London: Nick Hern Books, 2007, 127.</footnote>
Those experiences seem to help the inhabitants of a city to redefine their sense of community.
What is also interesting for me is that all those plays are history plays. As defined on the site
of Dorchester community play, "**the essence of the modern community play is that it tells a
story taken from the community's past. Typically, the historical setting will be factual while
the actual story may be fictitious but nevertheless makes use of authentic material. And if the
play has resonances today so much the better**<fnref n="3" />."

As a result previous Community plays were set in the Victorian era (Entertaining Strangers),
in pre-Roman and Roman times, during the Viking invasion, in the seventeenth century, in
Georgian England (A Time to Keep), and the next one will be set in the 15th century (Spinning
the Moon). Only two of the six plays performed in Dorchester have been published so far, both
most probably because they were written or co-written by a famous playwright, David Edgar.
The next one, Spinning the Moon will – perhaps – be published and distributed along with the
programme of the play. I will follow the creation of this play step by step and have already
met the playwright for an interview.

The link between past and present is made concrete because the play happens at the same
place, and is performed by descendants of the real individuals whose lives are being told on
stage. Anne Jellicoe comments on that very strong feeling: "**There was a feeling of 'it
happened here' and confusion in terms of us and them and then and now.**" (Entertaining
Strangers, 4)

1. A few words about the published plays:

First *Entertaining Strangers* in 1985. The play begins in the present time, with inhabitants of Dorchester (they are presented as “real people in contemporary clothes in the stage directions) explaining that they have found genuine documents (birth certificates, family notebooks...) about the “characters” in the play. The past is literally excavated in front of the eyes of the spectators as the scene shifts to the Greyhound Yard where further artefacts were found by archaeologists on the occasion of the building of the new Waitrose. Reality and fiction intermingle, both in the present and in the past: the present-day characters play with modals to present the story that they will be telling: this is how it “could have happened”, and it all starts with one of them trying to recover on the site and at night, a plastic file of personal

<footnote n="3">³ http://www.dorchestercommunityplay.org.uk</footnote>
notes he "**didn't leave**" but "**could have left**". Then the action jumps backwards several times: the present-day character first meets a 70-year old Victorian parson, this is 1870, then a 57-year old woman in 1850, and finally the same woman but much younger, in 1828. The play then develops forward in chronological order, from 1828 to 1870.

David Edgar wrote a second community play for Dorchester with Stephanie Dale in 2007. A *Time to Keep* is set in 1804, as the city of Dorchester prepares for a possible invasion by the troops of Napoleon, and as King George III and his family are also visiting, the community decides to mount an entertainment about the town's history to sustain morale: the play-within-the-play is about another well-known historical fact that happened in Dorchester in 1706, a story with which Thomas Hardy was obsessed and which he described in letters and articles. It is the story of Mary Channing who was the last woman burnt at the stake in Dorchester for poisoning her husband.

Stephanie Dale is currently writing the next community play which will be created in Dorchester in 2020. I have interviewed her two weeks ago and this is how she presented the play, entitled *Spinning the Moon*: the play is set in 1486 and covers a 50-year period, it begins with a farmer who comes back from the War of the Roses in which he served, and has to adapt to new agricultural techniques, with the collapse of the Manorial system, and the clearance of land for sheep. This switch meant that many labour hands were not only stripped of their jobs (you needed only one man to look after a flock of sheep) but also out of their houses as the rich bought land from the lords of the manor and covered it with sheep, pushing the people who had so far lived on it off the manor houses, into the woods.

Once more the play is a history play, but Stephanie Dale insists it is linked to the present, and more particularly to the refugee crisis: "**part of writing a community play is to explore cultural resonances [between] the past and present. (...) It's about bring[ing] a group of people together to create a community, to explore the place where they spend their lives, to look at what has happening then and now. (...) Currently the world is experiencing a refugee crisis. Part of the landless plot will explore how it must feel to be forced to leave your home. Peter [Cann, the director] and I are always keen to ask "how is the past connecting with now?" And I think that is one very clear example. They are landless, they are moving, they're dispossessed; they're moving on; how does that feel?"** (Interview of Stephanie Dale by Andrew Barrett, unpublished)
## 2. Political (and social) ideals

I have thus started exploring the **ideals** behind the creation of a community play, not only as they are developed in the text of the plays, but also in the way those plays are created, the techniques used and principles upheld.

Jon Oram, who is considered the specialist, defines those principles and techniques in his website:

> "The purpose of a community play is to enable the widest number of people in a community to produce and participate in an original play that is challenging, contemporarily relevant and of high artistic quality. The plays are inclusive in all aspects, anyone and everyone can participate in all areas of producing the play including management, design, making, research, acting and much more. The production is community owned and community led. The process of producing a community play releases and develops the thinking, talents, and skills of individuals and the community – often leading to further collective activity long after the play is over<fnref n="4" />."

In this quote three defining characteristics of a play are defined: its content, which should be original and linked with the present, its high level of requirement (though not made solely by professionals, it is a work of quality), and its mode of production (communal, inclusive), which is obviously linked to the political and social ideals of the creators behind the project: the main goal is not to merely produce entertainment but create a new sense of identity for a community which unites in and is defined by the project.

In concrete words, in Dorchester, a committee was formed in the 1980s composed of 10 non-professional volunteers. They are the ones who choose the writer and define what they call a "social agenda" (they agree on the general subject of the play, the fact that it is linked to Dorchester's history...). Besides them, the only professionals who participate and are paid are the writer or writers, the director, the stage manager, the musical director and the designer + sometimes a choreographer. Last but not least, between 80 and 130 inhabitants of Dorchester will participate in the creation of the play, either researching the subject, or creating costumes, or having parts. The whole process takes around 2 years.

For instance, the next play will have 12 performances in June 2020. Stephanie Dale has been writing the play after having met the committee in November 2017. She will have the text

<footnote n="4">⁴ http://www.communityplays.com/past-plays.html</footnote>
read to the committee in March or April 2019. Workshops will then be organized with the population, casting in the last months of 2019 and rehearsals from January to June 2020.

This is a much longer process than for a professional play, and it is possible only because the vast majority of participants are not paid. In terms of numbers of participants you may have a look at the two published text to get an impression as to the huge number of parts that had to be created so as to include all the inhabitants who wanted to be part of the creation. Instead of doubling, Edgar had to resort to "halving", dividing important parts among several performers in *Entertaining Strangers*, and a note on characters and casting for *A Time to Keep* explains: "We were inundated with volunteers (...). Against all our instincts and usual practices, we found ourselves needing to add rather than to subtract characters from the cast, asking if so-and-so couldn't have a sister, or a servant (or two servants), or a mother, or a child? As a result, the character list contains over 115 names." (*A Time to Keep*, XVII)

### 3. A common world?

To comment on and think about what this form implies, I have been helped by an essay written by Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, entitled *Le commun* (thanks to Claire Omhovère and the discussions we had around the definition of our next topic for research).

The philosopher Pierre Dardot and the sociologist Christian Laval argue that we are currently living through a crisis which is social, environmental and political. This crisis has led to a rise of nationalist and xenophobic movements as an answer to the message sent by governments, a message based on individualism and capitalism: the state is not there to protect society, society is composed of individuals who need to be responsible and independent.

They then analyse many examples of social endeavours that aim at recreating a “common world” through communication, redefining how we can live together, find common roots (be they historical, social or religious for instance). I think that community plays are part of that movement, and I wish to analyse further not only the process, but also the limits of that type of creation, defining the differences between communalism and communitarianism, sectarianism and a sense of the community.

I know for a fact that all the professional participants in those creations are liberal left-wing, that they will try to share their ideals, and communicate about themes that are close to their hearts: about homelessness, about migrants, about opening up to other cultures or other
religions, against Brexit etc. But this is not necessarily the case of the non-professional
participants. And this is clearly not the case of the audience.

As an example, Stephanie Dale told me of a workshop she has recently organised where inhabitants of Dorchester participated along with homeless people (but they had not presented themselves as such). People were encouraged to list all their problems, or the problems they thought the community faced. The price of parking came foremost (probably along with the price of fuel) until a woman said she saw more and more homeless people. S Dale was hopeful but the woman went on to explain that it was really annoying that she had literally to step over so many of them to get in the supermarket. Obviously, participating in such workshops, even along with homeless people, will not change her way of looking at society overnight, but we can only hope that mixing with the people she fears and does not understand may help her understand their point of view a little better.

Stephanie Dale described her next play as political, but in a more covert way. For instance, known left-wing writers will not be chosen by the committee because they antagonize part of the audience from the start. The tactic is not to confront the audience or indeed the actors violently (which was the case of the Wild Bunch for instance whose motto was to “stir the shit”), but to be on their sides. It is also not necessarily aiming at helping those who make the news be they migrants or the homeless but also helping handicapped people, or the elderly, who face solitude, groups who feel they are cast out from the community as well, but that nobody cares. Thus community plays will not necessarily change the political stance of the participants but will certainly create new ties, and those who acted in *Entertaining Strangers* in 1985 still see each other today!

On the very night after I had had that long conversation with Stephanie Dale I went to the National Theatre and saw David Hare's last play *I'm not Running*, which is about a woman who has laid a local health campaign and wonders, for two hours and a half, whether she will run in the next election for the Labour Party. David Hare, the National Theatre, and a play about the Labour Party obviously draw a specific audience, already converted to the cause, part of a microcosm sharing the same private jokes and the same cultural references, the same language even. What is more the form is also much more traditional, in a proscenium theatre with a clear separation between actors and audience.

The contrast between the two experiments is striking, though David Hare shares the same political beliefs as Edgar or Dale.
As an example of that contrast let me quote just one long cue of the last scene of the play, which is a lengthy conversation where a longstanding member of the Labour Party tries to convince the heroine that ideals are not what makes a good candidate for an election: "*Tell you: you'd make a terrible leader of the Labour Party because you don't care about it. I do. You have no sense of its identity, and worse, no sense of its traditions. I know you're the most popular person in Britain but that's because you're single-issue. Single-issue's easy. Single-issue isn't politics, single-issue is a way of having no politics. We can all take a cause – women, black people, health, animals - hey! the planet – and have a marvellous time pushing the cause. But governing's different*^5.^"

Here we are on the side of professional politics, with its lingo, its rules and its codes, which are not understandable by people who do not BELONG, the central question of the character's argument being that the woman cannot represent the party at the next election because she is not a member. On the other hand, the audience of community plays is more varied, perhaps more vulgar, which is also a way of defining what is common. Interestingly, if, contrary to that of the National Theatre, it doesn't share a knowledge which is above the common (more specialized), or "supra vulgus", it shares, perhaps, a common sense. There remains for me to define what that common sense is, and if it is linked to a shared nationality, a shared religion, a shared history...

If the community play is theoretically open to everyone, previous productions have seen only very few outsiders (that is people who were only just arrived in Dorchester, who were migrants or foreigners) (4 or 5) actually participate. What is more, those who participate are often considered by those who don't as a closed group. This is even the case with smaller groups inside the company who share the same scenes and will tend to divide themselves from the rest of the community because they concretely share the same lines!

Here I am tempted to compare the experience of Community plays in England with other types of communal creations.

<footnote>^5 David Hare, *I'm Not Running*. London: Faber and Faber, 201!, 112</footnote>
#### 1. mystery plays

Since 1950, the city of Chester (among others) has had a Mystery every five years. The model is here even more clearly that of the middle ages<fnref n="6" />. The idea is also to create a sense of belonging, of communion (this time with a religious meaning). But the play is Christian so by definition it seems to exclude all other religions.

Stephanie Dale also wrote a mystery play for Chester, and the two forms share the same aim: linking the past and the present. Thus recent mystery plays have commented on the environment, or on the migrants in Calais, or on military violence and political tyranny.

Moreover, Community plays and Mysteries tell stories, and this in itself may explain their huge success. Thus Katie Normington, in her analysis of Modern Mysteries, states that the producers of successful Mystery Play adaptations "have sought to divert the religious focus (...) into a contemporary parallel" because the value of such plays lies not in their scriptural content but in their "epic scale, decorum and (...) story-telling potential." (Katie Normington, *Modern Mysteries: Contemporary Productions of Medieval English Cycle Dramas*, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2007, 147-148).

Another common feature is that the modern mystery plays, like the community plays, also rely on non-professional actors who will perform a text adapted from the medieval cycles by a professional writer.

But if we look closer, this aspect of the production may be slightly different: on the one hand, the rare professional actors who are cast in community plays are given secondary roles (in Anne Jellicoe's words: "**the amateurs played the larger parts, but we found that a few professional actors in the middle of a crowd scene quickly brought the level of excitement up.**" (*Entertaining Strangers*, 3)), it is the contrary in Mystery Plays were the few professional actors are given the main roles such as God, Jesus or the Devil, while community casts (among whom many have had some kind of professional theatre training) play crowds.

<footnote n="6">⁶ A significant development occurred during the Middle Ages, with the rise of the mystery plays, ritualized narratives of Christianity which developed through the parallels that are obvious between the rituals of mass and those of theatre: re-enacting the sacrifice on the cross, sharing a cathartic moment, telling the (Hi)story of Saints by embodying them.</footnote>
Interestingly, when community plays are history plays, mysteries are supposedly set somewhere nearer the present. Nevertheless, if we look at the costumes, contemporary dress actually means vintage clothing design, recalling WWII and its aftermath. This is probably meant as a reference to the first revivals of Mystery Plays in 1951, as a tribute to a tradition.

So whereas the contemporary characters who appear in Community plays are dressed in the same way as the audience (Beginning of *Entertaining Strangers*: "Three real people enter, in contemporary clothes" (13)), those of mystery plays are dressed in old-fashioned clothing.

Finally, as you may have noticed I have not shown any photographs of community plays, that is because those I could find were not very good. That is because they had not been taken by photographers but by participants, who are not professionals. This is also a sign of the general lack of funding of CP: tellingly the seats for Chester Mystery plays are twice as expensive as those for Dorchester community plays. And they get much more funding, by the Arts Council and by the Church.

Nevertheless, though I thought at first that the two forms were widely different because I probably overestimated the Christian dimension of modern Mystery Plays. There are differences, but there are also a lot of common features, and I will have to look deeper into them.

## 2. Cinéscenie

Another interesting comparison would be with a French equivalent: the night show entitled "Cinéscenie" in the amusement park "Le Puy du Fou". The show also is historical, telling the story of the French Revolution from the point of view of farmers from the Vendée. Though the message could almost be said to be revisionist, there are a number of similarities between the two productions. For one thing, contrary to the other shows presented in the amusement park throughout the day and which are performed by professionals, the cinéscenie relies on non-professional volunteers who are ready to give time, often to give up holiday plans, for the benefit of this common experience, and the idea that the money the show will make will be reinvested in the department (so beneficial for the community as a whole). For another, both "history plays" are based on the same idea of changing points of view. When the cinéscenie takes that of poor farmers who are royalists and who decide to fight against the ideals of the French Revolution, *Entertaining Strangers, A Time to Keep* and *Spinning the Moon* are also about common people, farmers, servants, pub owners or smugglers. They are all examples of
people's history, or history from below, with protagonists who are not members of the aristocracy but are poor and marginalized.

One may imagine here that the audience will identify more willingly with those individuals, and that inhabitants of Dorchester or of the Puy du Fou will feel that finally they are under the spotlight and given a voice.

> Nevertheless I would like to try and define more precisely the differences between the cinéscenie at the Puy du Fou and Community Plays. I suspect, one difference may be the final aim of such endeavours, and the ideology behind them. In the words of Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval: "Qui ne se retrouverait pas, au moins en paroles, dans l'aspiration à refaire « monde commun », à rétablir une « communication rationnelle », à redéfinir un « vivre ensemble » ? Une aspiration qui peut d'ailleurs nourrir aussi bien le républicanisme le plus intransigeant que tous les communautarismes particuliers qui en appellent aux enracinements, aux origines, aux traditions, aux croyances<fnref n="7" />. »

My contention is that when the cinéscenie pictures a different point of view and presents another version of history, their aim is to convince outsiders that the received history is questionable. Their aim is consequently didactic, if not propagandist. It is also focusing on the representation of Vendéens and presenting them as particular, or special, to spectators who are not Vendéens, who do not share the same roots.

In the case of the community plays on the other hand, there is no real historical lesson to be drawn. What is pictured is the received history (with the Queen and King, the aristocracy etc), but including in the picture characters who are generally left outside the frame because they are considered as less interesting, less central. The aim seems rather to broaden the picture, so as to include characters who are closer to the spectators of the show in that they are anonymous, unimportant, unknown. This partakes of a general trend which is visible for instance in modern TV adaptations of the Classics, and in contemporary novels which rewrite the Classics from a different point of view. This is the case for instance of a lot of new productions of or around Jane Austen's novels. In her novels, the poor seldom appear, the servants have no voice and remain anonymous. But recent TV adaptations have added scenes where they appear much more vividly, for instance a 1996 adaptation of *Emma* by the BBC,

<footnote n="7">⁷ Pierre Dardot et Laval Christian. *Le Commun. Essai sur le révolution au XXe siècle*. Paris : La Découverte, 2014, 21</footnote>
which includes Gypsies, groups of poor children or thieves and poachers. Similarly, following
the example of Ishiguro's *The Remains of the Day*, many authors have rewritten Austen's
novels from the point of view of the servants, for instance Jo Baker's novel *Longbourn* (2013).
One finds also many references to Austen's novels in *A Time to Keep*: it is set at the beginning
of the 19th century, it is located where the young Jane Austen holidayed, and many characters
of the play are inspired by those of Austen. There is no question that it is a way for the authors
to pander to the tastes of the audience who relish in costume drama and unavoidable cultural
and literary references, but it also adds in poor people, servants and poachers who complete
the picture.

I think this ideal of establishing a new communication and defining how we can all live
together and share the same world (in the words of Laval and Dardot) is more the aim of those
Community Plays than that of the Cinéscenie. This is best exemplified by the ending of both
*Entertaining Strangers* and *A Time to Keep*, where the company as a whole comes on stage
and sings the same song, encouraging the audience to sing along. This is a very moving and
efficient moment which Stephanie Dale recalls particularly vividly.

Indeed, having a participating audience is a stated expectation in community plays, and
actually one of the rules set by the committee.

And this is not the case of the Cinéscenie where actors will address the audience, face the
spectators and sing to them, but will not have them become active. On the contrary, in *A Time
to Keep* for instance, the interval is used as a break when members of the cast mix with the
spectators and interact. This interaction also blurs the limits between past and present:
> "During the interval, the audience becomes gradually aware that everything on sale from
costumed salespeople – drinks, snacks, merchandise – is contraband. In addition, selected
members of the audience are approached and asked to ‘look after’ items. At the end of the
interval, excise men raid the refreshments and merchandise stalls, dragging the salespeople
away (...). They also arrest costumed citizens who have received contraband items to ‘look
after’. None of the real audience with contraband will be arrested, but they don’t know that."
*(A Time to Keep, 75)*

This is actually theorized by Jon Oram who created the concept of the “social actor”: “A social
actor somehow has permission to implicate the audience in the drama, because this is their
home territory; the actors and audience are neighbours. (...) The fact that the actor comes
from the community makes the audience’s transition from spectator to involved performer
almost seamless. There's a feeling of equality and intimacy when the cast and audience come
from the same community." (Afterword to *A Time to Keep*, 131)

Another technical choice which partakes of the same wish to create new bonds and include
the spectators as equals is to have the plays performed outside theatres, in barns, schools,
churches, factories or castles: those locations are a common ground in that they do not belong
more to the actors than they do to the audience who lives there throughout the year.

Jon Oram sums up: "Each of these community plays demonstrates that they are capable of galvanising and motivating groups of people who feel they have lost control over their lives" (A Time to Keep, 131)

### 3. Gilets jaunes

The idea of losing control over one's life probably rings a bell in today's troubled times, and indeed I see many echoes between those movements towards the creation of a common society, a common culture, a common history, a common voice, and the recent outbursts in France with the "gilets jaunes": the disenfranchised rebel against the powerful. What remains for me to determine is what part of those movements is definitely populist, in French terms Poujadist; and how many of the ideals shared by those movements are tainted by sectarianism or revisionism or enclosure (to take up the vocabulary of the common, this time applied to fields, which is actually the theme of *Spinning the Moon*).

In that light, it seems the aim of community play writers is to counter that ideology by using
the same form. (cf participation in an international conference in Venice in April about
"Cultures of the Left in the Age of Right-Wing Populism) Once more, taking up the words of
Laval and Dardot: "Le commun est à penser comme co-activité, et non comme co-
appartenance, co-propriété ou co-possession" (Le Commun, 48). The creation of the show
thus becomes a new wealth to be shared among the community, a commonwealth. The idea
is therefore not to define shared roots which already exist and are considered as a good, but
to build together an inclusive world where a new story is created to be enjoyed and shared by
as a many people as possible. Thus, in a preface to *Entertaining Strangers*, the creator of the
Community Play Anne Jellicoe writes: "One day I was discussing whether we should play
without an interval or not, when Baz Kershaw of Medium Fair said: 'You must have a coffee
break because then you'll involve more people.'", and it flashed upon me that we were in the
job of involving people in creating a work of art: if they actually gave of themselves in order to help the creation, support it, belonged to it, then it would be theirs. Later I realized that creating a work together, as part of a community, enormously stimulates and refreshes that community. Communities need community events to continuously revitalize themselves.”

(Entertaining Strangers, 3)

Another point I will have to look into is how Community plays, when compared to History Plays written by a playwright on his own, don't rely solely on specialists and experts, but allow everybody to have a say. How do they nevertheless avoid populism remains to be seen.

## CONCLUSION

A final echo: Simon Stephens who was interviewed during a conference organized in Paris entitled Crossing Borders explained how he thought that Brexit won because the people did not want facts, did not want figures and scientific explanations, but they wanted to be told stories. According to him, the Remainers failed to tell a good story about Europe, and that may be the challenge facing the next writers of Community Plays. I also heard this idea expressed by commentators who analysed the movement of the Gillets Jaunes, and said that the media had lost the trust of the people, and that journalists should become again narrators so as to regain that trust.

Marianne Drugeon