Medieval Plays in Modern Performance (2MP)

Medieval Plays in Modern Performance: An International Archival Project

The religious drama of medieval England languished unperformed for almost 300 years. One of the legacies of the mid-seventeenth-century Puritan regime that closed all theatres as ungodly, was the much more long-lasting scrupulosity which forbade the impersonation of the deity on stage. Although ‘playing God’ was not, as is commonly believed, prohibited by law, generations of Lords Chamberlain customarily vetoed the performance of subject matter based on the New Testament, with the full backing of Lambeth Palace.

The lifting of state censorship from the British theatre in the 1960s finally made possible the reconstruction and re-interpretation of medieval biblical plays for modern audiences. This, however, followed a succession of campaigns, pressure groups, and theatrical experiments with material whose contentiousness seems remarkable to modern sensibilities, spanning all the preceding decades of the twentieth century.

“2MP” has been formed as an international collaborative research project to capture the archives of these early experiments before they are lost with the demise of the early pioneers.

The broad aims of this project are to:

• encourage holders of collections in the field to make secure provision for the on-going custody of materials in their care and to consider issues such as conservation of materials, and archival standards in cataloguing
• undertake a scoping and mapping exercise, determining the location, extent, condition, and ownership/copyright of all materials relating to twentieth-century productions of plays from the British Isles which were written and/or produced in the period prior to the establishment of the professional playhouse
• form an on-line collections-level catalogue