A few changes are afoot...

Hello!
If you've been here before you may be a tad confused - why the name change?  What's going on?
Well, we're having a bit of a rebrand and new things are afoot.  Hell, it's a positive leg worth of material a coming.
But that's a little way off - you'll have to be patient.
More soon!

Johan Johan by John Heywood - Full Audio

The recording of the live radio performance of Johan Johan by John Heywood is now available to listen online.

John John by John Heywood
Adapted for audio by Robert Crighton

John - Mark Jenner
Tyb - Sian Notley
Sir John the Priest - Robert Crighton
Narrator - Heidi Bernhard-Bubb

Recorded at the Quay Theatre on Saturday 3rd September 2016

Johan Johan - or A mery play between John Johan the husbande, Tyb his wyfe, and Syr Johan the preest by John Heywood.

Finally, a bit of Heywood

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.

God's Promises - Act Six

Mark Holtom reading for Esaias...

It's been a long time since I recorded this act, covering the prophet Esaias - as Bale writes it.  This is Act Six of Seven, this prophet being the forerunner to the forerunner John the Baptist, who I've posted previously.
These recordings are very basic, they've been produced largely on the hoof, but they are I hope moderately clear.  Whilst I'm going to get a move on an record the remaining five acts this year, they won't deviate from this template - narration, text.  It's beyond my budget to have a score at this time, and that does limit the effect the words have.  This isn't, as I'd first assumed, the easiest of plays to translate to audio - without music or a visual set of cues, it is quite difficult to keep focus.  But one day I may get around to a more detailed production.
As I say, I hope to have this piece completed over the next few months - I might then create a shorter and more accessible version, to go with this no-frills approach.  Who says we can't be playful?

God's Promises by John Bale - Act Six - Esaias

Narrator - Annie Eddington
God - Robert Crighton
Esaias - Mark Holtom


And below is a player with all the parts recorded so far - at time of posting this includes the Prologue, Act Six and Seven and Epilogue.



God's Promises, like all my audio work, is supported by my patrons - becoming a patron is easy, just go to www.patreon.com/robertcrighton and make a pledge.

Backstage Photographs from Pride & Dame

To accompany the back stage photos for the medieval drama from the Magna Carta in Clare celebrations we include the programme notes for Pride and Dame Sirith.

THE PRIDE OF LIFE:

The Pride of Life is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, surviving play in the English language. 

There are many caveats to the above sentence.

Firstly, there are other surviving texts which come from about the same period in time, though it’s very difficult to put an exact date to these things.  Pride comes somewhere around 1350. 

Secondly, it doesn’t quite survive - not fully.  There are big gaps in the text we have and the second half / third is completely lost, so it can’t be classed as an extant play. 

Thirdly, though in English, the text is Irish in origin – at the very least by adoption, as this is where the manuscript was copied in the form which has come down to us.

So, on the face of it, not a very appropriate entertainment for a medieval banquet in 1215.

But what else is there?  When I was first approached to do something for the Magna Carta celebrations I racked my brains as to what was most appropriate.  We haven’t got any surviving plays in English prior to 1350 – and I didn’t think that the average persons knowledge of Latin would be up to it.  Thinking a little sideways I considered some later plays about King John.  But all three King John plays from the early modern period have one major deficiency. 

They don’t mention Magna Carta.  At all.

So I made a compromise – the earliest play that was doable and which features at least a thematic link to the story of King John.  The Pride of Life is, as the title suggests, about pride and a prideful King at that.  It resonates nicely.

For all the incompleteness of the text, it is performable thanks to the detail afforded by the banns that open the play – a prologue that tells the whole of the plot, including the ending.  To make the play more whole I have added a section of another early English play – from an East Anglian Mystery play about the death of Herod – to round off the story dramatically, as well as a playless Epilogue that has survived as a fragment.  It is possible this Epilogue has never been performed as part of a production for six hundred years as, being without a play to perform before it, why would anyone use it?  One can never be certain of such things, someone else might have had the idea before me, but it’s an exciting thought.

The Pride of Life has been performed more recently than the mid 14^th Century, though I haven’t had a chance to hunt out any specific productions – either student or professional.  The BBC produced a reasonably accurate version for the Third Programme in the 1950’s as part of their The First Stage series.  It used the prologue throughout the play (which, short as it was, was cut down and heavily modernised) to cover the gaps in the text.  Sadly this recording is only currently available if you can find the LP release of the series (which thanks to ebay I have) – which I doubt will get a wider airing.  I have therefore recorded our cast performing our text of the play and this audio recording (and video footage we hope to make of the last rehearsals and performance) will be put online for free to introduce interested people to the play.

As part of this production I have endeavoured to retain as much of the original text as possible and not overly modernise it.  We have only cut four lines from the extant play and altered some readings where the corrupted text gave me some license to be bolder with changing lines.  I have written two additional lines to one speech where a gap in the text doesn’t complete the rhyming scheme – though this reconstruction is based on patterns found in other plays of the period.  For those who are interested the original play ends with the final lines of Mirth, just as Death kills him.  Sadly none of the original dialogue for Death survived, which is a shame as he’s a marvellous conversationalist in most medieval texts.

I would like to thank the Magna Carta in Clare committee for hosting this Before Shakespeare* production and for producing such a welcoming atmosphere.
[*Our original incarnation - Ed]

Some rehearsal shots for Pride of Life - first full tryout with costumes.

Adam reading from his medieval mobile phone...

A Magna Carta Mumming

The first part of the evening is a completely true account of the story of Magna Carta – told in the fashion of a Mumming.  Mumming is a slippery term, it can mean a lot of different things depending when it was produced and who it was for.  It could involve song, dance or drama.  We’ve used a loose folk ritual to create something new, something special for this event.  It isn’t an historical re-enactment; it is a reimagining of a form designed to illicit a few cheap laughs, created in the spirit of the medieval entertainments of the day, not in absolute fact.

The Mummers Are: Michelle Allen, Robert Crighton, Pat Curtis, Katie Landon, Beth Norris, Clarissa Seeley, Alban Smith-Adams & Kate Terry.  Costumes by Mary Denton.

Dame Sirith

Edited and performed by Robert Crighton

Dame Sirith isn’t quite a fable, if only because it doesn’t have a moral.  It tells the story of a monk, Wilekin, who takes a fancy to the wife of a merchant, one Dame Margery.  When the merchant is away the monk tries to woo Margery but she’s having none of it and sends him away with a flea in his ear.  About to give into despair he meets a friend who recommends Dame Sirith the hend (wise) to help him. 

He goes to her and, after a little bartering, she agrees to get Margery to relent.  To do this she uses a small dog and a jar of mustard... but we wouldn’t want to ruin the ending for you by saying anymore. 

Unlike our very fake Mumming, Dame Sirith is genuinely medieval, appearing towards the end of the 12^th Century, and so is something that would have been about at the time of King John.

This version is only lightly modernised, so features many old words (gange is one of our favourites) and unfamiliar phrasing – but hopefully through the modern day translation service of the storyteller’s backchat it will be both clear and amusing.

And a few shots from backstage during the Mumming - and our strange array of Mummers!

A Few Ground (not really) Rules

The moment you start rehearsing a production (or in our case record one) from any distant epoch, you have to start making decisions.  How slavishly do you stick to the text?  And, for that matter, which text?
Where the texts are as old as ours the questions mount up.

1. How closely do you stick to older word forms?
I like old words.  I like old words that are almost exactly the same as their modern equivalent but are a bit not, as it were.  However, I appreciate I'm in a minority here - some people would find slavish following of basically modern words said funny quite annoying.  So, there will be a balancing act between keeping the sense of the power of the original words, their rhythms, their purely sonic power, and clarity and understanding.  We may get it wrong.  Where there are rhymes we will tend to stick to the original...

2. Do you use original spelling to guide pronunciation?
Covers similar ground to above and also overlaps with accent below.  Broadly speaking, yes, though we're not here to create recordings of funny voices speaking funny words - we've got to balance the interests of drama and history.

3. Do you update/change names from history?
I've just been recording/editing Act Seven of John Bale's God's Promises, in which John the Baptist lists many characters from the Bible, sometimes with variant spelling to the modern.  On the one hand there was something nice about the sound of some changes, others were just unclear.  Where it was still clear who he was talking about we left it as writ, where the name was substantially different we allowed a change.

4. What about lines in Latin?
Do you leave them in / leave them and add a translation as repetition in the next line / translate?  We can assume that many in the original audiences, as today, would not understand Latin, so should what is clearly an artistic decision be ignored for ease of understanding?  In the case of God's Promises I erred on the side of clarity.  John the Baptist had a line 'as I am child' which sounded so much better in English - beautiful - that to not use it felt wrong.  A later line by God I've removed as it was repeated in English anyway and it sounded wrong - but I may put it back in at a later date.  Which brings us to...

5. Do we cut?
Any director likes the option of cutting, but part of the point of this project is to create a resource which has relatively 'clean' recordings of all the words.  It isn't difficult to find a recording or production of a Mystery play - it is difficult to find one that hasn't been substantially altered by an author or director.  (This isn't a judgement - for example, I love the version of The Mysteries Tony Harrison created in the late seventies/early eighties - but it is substantially his version.)  So, occasional minor cuts may happen, but they will be occasional and will be mentioned in any accompanying blog.

6. What about accent?
This shouldn't be tricky for me, as, though not a native or a speaker of the accent, I'm based in Suffolk and East Anglia was a centre for a lot of medieval and Tudor drama - in part compounded by the fact that a couple of collections survived in East Anglia and so survived East Anglian texts.  John Bale, who I'm looking at at the moment, was based in Suffolk and there are clues to accent in versions of the text.  However, I doubt we're going to have the time, resources or skill-set to comprehensively look at detailed work on accent at this time, so unless the text is incredibly forceful in its accent (the York Cycle for example) we will use an accent/s - but any text where the accent isn't overly defined, we're going to suck it and see.

7.  Music.
I'd love to use music throughout these recordings, especially where it is referenced in the text.  Two difficulties arise. One. we don't always know what the music was, or precisely how it was orchestrated when we do.  Two: at this stage I'm not in a position to commission or pay for music, so where music is indicated it will be referred to in any narration and maybe at a later date we will reedit with a music cue.  At the moment I'm focusing on the words.

All these are thoughts and artistic decisions that occur as the work begins.  Other questions will arise, other ways of dealing with them will occur, rapid u-turns may happen.  There is no reason why any of these recordings will stand on their own, or unaltered.  If something hasn't worked, we can go back and do it again.  Why not have several different versions of the same text, done differently?  And you out there could do your own.  I'll post a link, even host it for you if you don't have the facility.

Our Mission

Going Beyond Shakespeare – A (Revised) Mission Statement

Beyond Shakespeare there was a lot of stuff going on in the British Isles during the old days.  (For arbitrary neatness we have decided that the old days ended in 1642, when the theatres were closed.)  Apart from a few noble exceptions these plays are often passed over, ignored or simply unknown.  Much is simply lost.  This is a mouthpiece/online placeholder for the work of the Beyond Shakespeare Company, an holistic theatre company, who specialise in the repertory beyond Shakespeare, about the plays, fragmentary and extant, that shaped the theatrical world and our dramatic history – it will explore this world through the words and the sounds of those words.  Though these plays do get performed occasionally, they are often not recorded, they disappear from sight in a way that Shakespeare does not.  So, we are here to create, share, archive, and lobby for recordings of Not Shakespeare.  To put Shakespeare in his proper place - IN CONTEXT!

Accompanying these recordings will be additional material, discussion and talks on the plays and anything else that comes to mind at the time.  We’ll hopefully be joined by other actors, directors, academics, to help create new recordings and feed your interest.  We hope that others will join in, creating their own versions and sharing them for the world to hear - for anyone who’s interested in what isn't Shakespeare.
We're not rejecting Shakespeare totally either.  We do love his work, but he is eclipsing.  So much so that the only way to draw attention to his predecessors and contemporaries is to conjure up his name.  Shakespeare is a colossus, but that doesn’t render his co-workers pygmies.  We invoke his name so as to pull other playwrights from underneath his long shadow.

We are unapologetic in recording extracts or spending time on plays that are very obscure.  There are two reasons for this - 1. There is so very little material surviving from the medieval and early Tudor periods that every scrap is precious.  2.  Other people have or are already doing the obvious Not Shakespeare, so we don't need to.  You want a version of Doctor Faustus - try searching on Amazon, that'll get you where you need to go.

There's a whole heap of other stuff happening online and this blog may struggle to keep up - the best place to get up to speed will probably be our twitter feed @BeyondShakes
The Podcast can be found here.
Our Patreon can be found here.
You can make a one off donation to our work here.