After a few years of pootling along, we're finally getting around to attacking the work of John Heywood, an early Tudor playwright who created a selection of delightful interludes. Using the opportunity of doing a completely separate live streamed comedy show (Live from the Get In), I'm recording Johan Johan - or A mery play between John Johan the husbande, Tyb his wyfe, and Syr Johan the preest (which is a bit of a mouthful and a bugger to tweet) - in front of a live studio audience.
Here's how it works - the final show will be edited and adapted for audio (the physical comedy doesn't come across well for obvious reasons) but I've been recording all the read through/rehearsals so that there are several recordings of these - including one of the full text, plus actor discussion and general thoughts on performance. All this material will appear on the blog in the next few months.
We've had two full rehearsals so far, with another run to go - and so we've gone into this short interlude in some detail - for the moment here were some of our first impressions.
1. It's pretty rude. I knew the play was about cuckolding, but I'd not appreciated the full weight of the innuendo present of hard phallic objects being vigorously worked in the corner of the room. It's, sadly, something that will be lost in the audio recording, but the live audience will get it.
2. The opening speech has become very difficult to pull off. There's nothing like a long speech to open a play, where the protagonist goes into a lengthy debate as to whether to beat his wife or not, to endear that character to the audience. The joke is that he's obviously never going to actually do it, being too afraid of her, and that he keeps swapping between whether he should or not, what the neighbours will say, would it work etc. In the Tudor world, where the chastising of a wife would be acceptable behaviour, this was probably very funny - to the modern audience, this is, to say the least, problematic. We could argue that because he's never going to do it, there's no harm done - but that doesn't really hold much water and it will be interesting to see how the opening will read to the audience. I couldn't let the audience come in cold to this, so to give the play some context I've got a narrator to set the scene, and have cut the speech down so that the appeal for wife beating doesn't go on too long.
3. Pie making is a complicated business. I'd not appreciated how complicated the business of the pie in the story was. In the play, John John is cheated out of eating supper (a pie) by doing a pointless household chore. But the story of the pie runs through the whole play - from arriving in the house at the start, to the back story of the commissioning and making of said pie prior. The backstory of the making of the pie is used by Sir John the priest to get admittance to John John's house and the eating thereof. I hope we'll make this clear to the audience.
4. Having two characters called John is a bit odd and not very helpful - though not actually a problem.
5. The play is, barring the opening (see above), really rather fun and we expect it to prove genuine laughter.
Assuming that the show I'm yoking this recording session to continues, I'm hoping to follow up the play with more from Heywood, recording versions of all his interludes - with the possible exception of The Play of the Weather, which is a bit too big for me at the moment, and which has been looked at in some detail elsewhere.
From the earliest drama in English, to the closing of the theatres in 1642, there was a hell of a lot of drama produced - and a lot of it wasn't by Shakespeare. Apart from a few noble exceptions these plays are often passed over, ignored or simply unknown. This is a blog about what exists beyond Shakespeare, about the plays, fragmentary and extant, that shaped the theatrical world that shaped our dramatic history.
