Green Men, Murder and Religious Mayhem - the Rochester Promenade Play

Yikes, what a week! I’m just back – today – from celebrating my mother’s 70th birthday by taking her to see La Traviata at the Millennium Centre in Cardiff and, finally, I have a few minutes to talk about the promenade play.

Actually, I feel like the last person who should be telling you about it – I didn’t even see it properly as I was the prompter for both performances. My eyes were glued to the script so I just listened and snatched odd visual snippets of what was going on. I will be able to watch it – eventually - as a cameraman from Kent Online has provided us with some uncut footage and the Ultimate Frisbee Freak was there with his digital video camera and the cathedral’s tripod recording it for family posterity.

We’d dreaded bad weather – particularly as one scene was played almost entirely in the cloister garden and we had no contingency plan other than to issue the audience with as many umbrellas as could be mustered – but, in the event, the sun shone all day, leaving the cast – most of whom were in medieval-style woollens – overheating in the unseasonal weather.

And the Indian summer encouraged the crowds to come. We had excellent audiences for both performances – in fact the audience for the first was almost too large, causing some delays between scenes and nasty moments of ‘do I come in now or not?’ for the poor cast. But all the actors coped with that – and all the other minor hitches of ‘with the audience’ performance - admirably. With ad libs to the fore and some nice moments of cast-audience interaction the whole thing was carried off with great aplomb.

Here are some pictures of the actors in action:

Actually, this one isn't an actor in action but, behind the mask (click on the picture to enlarge it) which was fixed to the outside of the organ loft, stood Bob, an actor with a mighty Green Man's voice which filled the cathedral with his rage during his anguished conversation with Justus, first bishop of Rochester:


Then there were the monks:
Ulf, the novice, who nearly slithered down the stairs in his haste to make his meeting with the Novice Master and

...Gundulf (not to be confused with Gandalf, despite the magician-like robes) aka The Weeping Monk of Bec who built the early bits of Rochester cathedral, its castle and the White Tower of London for William the Conqueror whom he didn't much approve of.

Then the audience was treated to a garden-based murder most foul. One of the cathedral's two saints - William of Perth, a thirteenth-century baker on pilgrimage - was done to death by his treacherous foster-son...


the story told by a storyteller and observed by a Madwoman...


...I'll leave you to work out which is which...

Then we watched as a conservator had a fright when the bishop whose memorial she was working on suddenly showed up with a lot of difficult questions...



...which were partly answered by the following scene in which two men who, in all probability never met - John Fisher and Nicholas Ridley - confront each other with chaplains at the ready...


The last scene, involving Dickens and a wholly fictitious biographer whom I had great fun inventing, allowed us to end on a poignant note - that of Dickens's last days.



Many thanks to my son, The Bassist, and to Richard Simmons both of whom took wonderful pictures of both performances in difficult circumstances.

And, in case you’re wondering where we came by all our fantastic costumes, the majority were designed and made by Berthe Fortin, a professional costume designer with whom we were very lucky to work. Berthe researched and produced all the medieval costumes which gave the early scenes – and particularly the story of William of Perth and Rochester’s madwoman - a great sense of unity and cohesion. The Dean and Chapter kindly made real vestments available for some of our Bishops and their chaplains which meant that the contrast between bishops Fisher and Ridley was wonderfully highlighted by the difference in clerical clothing the two men wore.

Of course, most of the experience of writing a play and having it produced is unlike novel-writing. The interactivity, the different medium, the audience… But one thing is exactly the same – the minute it’s finished and you can’t do anything to change it, you want to rewrite, cut, polish and change.
Fortunately for the actors, I restrained myself...

Many, many thanks must go to the Dean and Chapter of Rochester cathedral for giving me such free rein to interpret the history of their lovely cathedral in my own way – their faith in me is very much appreciated.

The Play's the Thing.. or is it the Actors?

As a novelist, you always know what your characters look like, what they sound like, how they move, what they’re fundamentally about.

It’s different with plays. When you write dialogue for actors you can have your views on these things but – in the end – they will be decided by the actor playing the part. Of course, if you’re the director as well as the author, you can influence how the character is played, but only to a certain extent. After all, an actor’s appearance can only be altered just so much; you can’t make a tall man short or a person of 50 look 20 (though it’s possible to do the reverse operation if you’ve got a good makeup artist).

So, writing and directing a play has been a very interesting process. (If you don’t know what I’m going on about, read this post.)

When you’re writing a novel, words are the only tools at your disposal. Crossing the tracks to writing dialogue, I kind of assumed that – to an extent - words would suffice there, too, but I’ve been surprised at how much of a difference costume and location within the cathedral make.

For instance, at the beginning of the dress rehearsal on Wednesday night, I walked in to the dressing room and saw a grey-haired, bearded man in a frock coat whom I completely failed to recognise as Owen, the actor who is playing Dickens! Suddenly, he was Dickens. And it may or may not have made a difference to how he felt about the lines, how he spoke them, but it certainly made a difference to how I heard and felt them.

What I’d forgotten, of course, is that both the writer’s and the reader’s imagination are constantly moving beyond the words on the page to see the characters they’re reading about. Writers and readers do what actors do – they use their imaginations to see the people on the page and to breathe life into them.
Obviously, the imaginative work required of the reader is slightly less onerous than that required of the writer – the reader doesn’t have to invent everything from scratch, merely to put their own interpretation on what the writer has written but, without imagination, the process of reading and understanding a book is impossible.

So, actors do for their audience what a reader’s imagination does. They take the bare words on the page, imagine what lies behind them and flesh the characters out, bringing them alive in the process.

All of which makes play-writing a far more collaborative process than novel writing, even if – as they playwright – you never get to influence the production. You are still in a process of collaboration with the actors to present the finished piece to the audience. In my case, I’ve been lucky enough to influence the production very much as its director, and it’s been wonderful to work with the actors.

Tomorrow is production day. If anybody is in or around Rochester, do come along to the cathedral and join in the festivities for the new interpretation project’s launch. You can try out the new audio-guides (voiced by Jools Holland) look at all the spiffy new display panels, see the audio-visuals and even watch the promenade play. First performance is at noon and the second will begin, seamlessly, just after one.

And the cathedral has a very nice tea-room too…

I am still alive...

I have, I fear, been a very dilatory blogger recently. This is partly because I have been busy with the promenade play, partly because I am - meanwhile - trying to fit in as much research and thinking as I can on The Black and The White and partly – no, mainly – because I am utterly knackered. In ten days' time we go on holiday and I can barely wait. Not having a proper summer holiday last year has had a terrible knock-on effect into the whole of the last twelve months and the Other Half and I are determined never to let it happen again. A fortnight off must be taken – a week is barely time enough to begin to relax.

So, where am I on various projects?

Well, the promenade play is now complete and has had its first run-through, though we were minus a number of cast members. Walking the thing through the cathedral raised a couple of issues – for instance the area in which I’d planned to have a murder taking place can’t actually be seen very easily from the position in which the audience will be standing at that point, so we’ve had to move it to a less dramatic but more visible spot – but, in general, it was felt that the action fits nicely in to the space. It does look, however, as if the people with the most to do on the day will be, not the actors, but the stewards whose job it’ll be to chivvy the audience through the cathedral at an appropriately fast clip so that we can get the whole thing done on time!

‘Aren’t we going to have long ‘lags’ whilst the audience catch up?’ a cast member asked.

Bloody valid question, I thought, gnawing some handy fingernails.

‘No’ said our casting director/the cathedral’s education officer who’s also playing The Madwoman of Rochester ‘we’ll just start when we’re ready and they’ll soon get the hang of the fact that they’ve got to keep up.’

Ruthless, I thought, but good… definitely good.

It was great hearing real actors speak my words as we went through the first read-through. People laughed when I hoped they would, nodded sagely at things they hadn’t known but were interested to learn (phew!) and the Green Man – cast for his wonderfully booming voice – is going to be fantastic as he fills the cathedral with his roars and his pagan cries of ‘Where are my trees?’

If it rains, the scene in the garden may be abandoned by the audience but the actors are hardened veterans of outdoor performances and were adamant that the show will go on however drenched they get. Stick some cathedral umbrellas by the south door and at least a few people will come out… seemed to be the general consensus.

There was a sticky moment when I realised that there’s going to be no honeysuckle in bloom in September (an essential prop in one scene) but our costume designer quickly came to the rescue and said she could so something in silk.

Yes, our costume designer. Not somebody’s mum or a put-upon volunteer, a real bona-fide costume designer. The Heritage Lottery Fund have given us a budget for the launch of the interpretation project, most of which is going to go on promenade play costumes. So, instead of having begged, borrowed, stolen and home-made costumes for each scene, we’re going to have the real thing, made by a professional whose last commission was to design all the costumes for a community opera in Lewes. It’s going to give a fantastic visual unity to the whole piece and Berthe (the lady in question) came along to the walk-through and took a whole memory-card’s worth of photos of the cathedral to inspire her and to use as background information. (What colours will stand out against this screen, will the black and white of the Tudor chaplains get lost in the polychrome of the lady chapel and if so what should be done about it, etc etc)

So, the promenade play is all coming together. The little casts for each scene will now go away and rehearse together and learn their lines before the next rehearsal towards the end of August when we’ll ‘block’ moves and start polishing things up. That’s going to be an interesting rehearsal as we can’t do it in situ because the cathedral’s being used for something else (tchah – a cathedral being used for services, how inconsiderate!). So I’m going to have to go around taking measurements at the site of each scene, so that we can mock up the approximate acting area, with columns, altars, steps etc, rendered in sticky-tape and cardboard boxes.

Should be fun…

As for the novel. Well, I’ve now met with Will, my editor, and talked it through, but news of that can wait for the next installment, I think.

As I mentioned, I am knackered…

The dangers of oversimplification

Sorry for the dearth of recent posts here – the promenade play, plus a couple of other work-related matters have been keeping me very busy. But, as I have now subdued the Reformation, so to speak, and am well on the way to finishing the last playlet (Dickens) I thought I’d post a few reflections on what I’ve been doing.

As John Fisher and Nicholas Ridley were both Bishops of Rochester and were on opposing sides (as it were) of the Reformation, we thought it would be interesting to have them confronting each other over an altar (which could plausibly act as a symbol of the whole Reformation argument as all altars moved from being stone, carved and ornate with beautiful hangings to being plain and wooden and bare – Rome vs. Puritanism).

But trying to distil the complex Reformation arguments of theology and religious practice into something around nine minutes long proved surprisingly (or, perhaps, unsurprisingly) difficult. Take into consideration the fact that this promenade play is not being written for an audience already well-versed in Church of England practice and history but for anybody from Rochester and the surrounding Medway Towns district who fancies a bit of casual Saturday afternoon entertainment and saying anything meaningful in such a short space of time moves into the realm of ‘distinctly tricky’.

So, I’ve slipped a bit of Why the Reformation Happened 101 into the transition from the previous scene to this one (as the characters and audience walk from the High Altar through the Quire and down into the nave, since you ask) and I’ve gone for lots of visual imagery so as not to make the whole thing too wordy. Oh and introduced two chaplains to the bishops who are basically into a whole game of ‘my bishop’s better than your bishop’. So we’ll see what everybody else involved thinks at the first production team meeting on Monday.

But one thing has struck me and that’s how easy it is to slip into saying things which are so simplified as to be scarcely recognisable as the actual truth. Strangely, my elder son came across this phenomenon when he was studying A-level biology. ‘Don’t worry about what you were taught at GCSE’ the class was told ‘because that was so over-simplified it was, basically, wrong. ‘ Actually, they were given to understand that, compared to the wonders that they would discover on a degree course should they choose to pursue the wonders of biological science, they’d discover that A-level wasn’t exactly 100% accurate either.

But then, isn’t it true that the more you look into anything, the more complex and multi-faceted it becomes? Nothing is simply cause and effect; everything is a multi-layered confection of causes, effects, spin-offs, unforeseen consequences, more effects and further causes of the next major upheaval.

When I was writing a speech for John Fisher (who fell foul of Henry VIII’s determination to divorce Catherine of Aragon in pretty much the same way as the more famous Thomas More did) on the whole sorry episode of ‘The King’s Great Matter’ I found myself making him say ‘If Catherine of Aragon had borne Henry a healthy son there would have been no break with Rome, no suggestion that the king was the ‘supreme head of the church in England’.
But is that true? If the sons Catherine gave birth to had lived to young manhood (bear in mind he was married to her for sixteen years before Anne Boleyn came on to the scene) would he really have been content to stay under the sway of the Pope? Would he have left the monasteries alone or did he have his eye on their great wealth anyway?

The problem with research is that you need to do it otherwise you’re in trouble; but the more you start asking questions, the more complicated everything becomes and you can end up in trouble anyway.

But ain’t that true of life in general?

A secret project now secret no longer

I have to confess that the current novel is having to take a bit of a back seat to the other work that is in progress chez moi at the moment. I’ve been working on it for a month already but, until today, I couldn’t really talk about it on this blog as it wasn’t official yet. But now, the project has been approved by the powers that be (the Dean and Chapter of Rochester Cathedral) and I can tell you that I am writing a series of 10-minute playlets that come together in a species of promenade play which will be performed in the cathedral on Saturday the 26^th of September.

What is a playlet? What is a promenade play?

Playlet is my term; we were going with ‘vignette’ but that sounded a bit grand.

Promenade play is not my term, it’s a proper bona fide name for a proper bona fide dramatic form. The action moves and the audience follows.

Why am I doing a promenade play?

Well, at one level, because I’ve always wanted to write something dramatic for a particular space - a play (for want of a better word) which uses the building as part of the narrative. We went to see a play in Canterbury Cathedral last year and I was very disappointed to see that a stage (albeit a rather intriguing, undulating stage) had simply been positioned at the end of the nave and we all sat looking at it, just as if we had been in a theatre. I thought it wasa missed opportunity to do something with the space.

At another level, I’m doing it because Rochester Cathedral is launching a new, Heritage Lottery Fund-backed interpretation project this year complete with swanky new guidebook, audio visual effects, state of the art audio-guides (including narration by Jools Holland) and all the reception paraphernalia needed to welcome and inform visitors. Though all this is going ‘live’ quite soon, the official launch, complete with Open Day is on September the 26^th.

Now, I glibly say ‘I’m doing this’ as if I’ve been comissioned – from a throng of hundreds of other eager potential writers of promenade plays – to make this so. But, to be honest, though being picked from a throng of.. etc would have been lovely, that’s not quite how it went. This is how it actually went.

My Other Half is the Director of Operations at Rochester Cathedral. (That’s actually all you need to know isn’t it?) Ages ago (probably on the occasion of the aforementioned locationally-disappointing play) I told her that I’d like to write something for Rochester if they were up for it. As I was then, and for months afterwards, heavily into writing Not One of Us, she didn’t discuss it with anybody at the cathedral but, once NOOU was finished, she mentioned the idea to the Interpretation Manager who was very excited by the idea.

Within days I was sitting at a meeting with her and with the Education officer. It was one of the most extraordinary meetings I’ve ever been to. Now, if you’re going to have any idea why it was so extraordinary, you have to understand the background here. I’ve spent most of my working life within the NHS. Meetings occur. Decisions are made. The two are not always temporally related. At lteast not as temporally related as I would like. Usually meetings are had, ideas are discussed, sub-committees and working groups are formed, ideas are picked apart so as to be hardly recognisable, re-constituted by committee until all the originality has been removed, the original meeting is re-convened, the new, sanitised, guideline-compliant idea is resubmitted, teeth are sucked and – with luck - the idea is taken forward. A pilot occurs. Feeback is sought. After approximately two years something almost entirely unrecognisable as the original idea might actually be implemented throughout the team concerned.

As the person usually putting forward the ideas (all brilliant, natch…) I found this excruciating. I don’t do committees. My idea of joint working – actually expressed in so many words to one of my many line-managers, once – was ‘You get a committee to decide what you want, tell me and I’ll produce it for you.’ Inexplicably, they rarely went for this approach…

Anyway, after that axe-grinding digression, where was I? Oh yes, this meeting. Well, we arrived with no agenda and no real ideas of what we were going to do. I mentioned a few things I’d noticed in a swift trawl through the new guidebook in my Other Half’s office whilst waiting for the meeting’s appointed start time and, one of them following my lead, we were off on flights of ideas. At the end of an hour – yes, a mere hour – we had a plan. Six ten-minute vignettes in various, already decided-upon, locations around the cathedral would form a promenade play which would run through twice, so that visitors to the Open Day, if they wandered in and caught vignette three, for instance, could simply continue promenading until number three came around again.

Let me just say that again, for the benefit of other people who have suffered the kind of stultifying decision-making process that monolithic organisations tend to employ. At the beginning of an hour we had nothing. At the end of an hour we had a viable project which we were all very excited about. And that we were just going to go off and do. I was nearly delirious with shock at being able to have ideas, get them provisionally agreed and go away to make them happen within sixty minutes. It was probably the single most creative hour I’ve ever spent in the company of other human beings.

Fortunately, the Dean and Chapter operate on a similarly ‘can do’ basis and, with very minor and helpful suggestions, have waved the project through with smiles and thanks.

Compared to the kind of meeting process described above, it makes you want to weep, honestly.

So, thusfar, I have written an interesting encounter between a mythical Green Man (there are Green Man bosses on the cathedral’s wooden ceiling) and the cathedral’s first, seventh-century, bishop, Justus; given a young monk a close encounter with the tenth-century builder-monk Gundulf who built not only Rochester cathedral but also the White Tower of the Tower of London (amongst other things); arranged for one of Rochester’s saints – the martyr William of Perth – to be murdered all over again in the cloister garth and had a conservator given the shock of her life by being accosted by the real-live fourteenth-century bishop whose tomb she is restoring. I’ve still got a somewhat frosty dispute between the Reformation martyrs John Fisher and Nicholas Ridley to write and an encounter with Charles Dickens who had a long association with the city of Rochester and lived nearby.

The research – some of which overlaps with the research I’m doing for The Black and The White – has been fascinating. And trying to say something meaningful, educational, amusing and visually interesting in ten minutes is a great challenge for somebody who generally writes thick books. It helps that I used to have a column in a local newspaper that was limited to 500 words – I do know how to be concise… I’m just usually not.

Anyway, no doubt there will be more to say about all this in the coming weeks… you have been warned!