The York Plays: Ancient Drama At Keele And Steeles

Performing Arts & Entertainment in Canada, Summer, 2000 by Robyn Gillam

A truly magical transformation: York University Arts students become white-robed Egyptian priests and deities as they stage two of the most ancient written dramas, The Triumph of Horus and The Mysteries of Osiris. Photography Robyn Gillam.

THE ORIGINAL YORK PLAYS, FIRST PERFORMED IN 1378, WERE A CYCLE OF 48 DRAMAS DEPICTING THE CHRISTIAN history of the world. They are the earliest known example of a type of Medieval drama also known as miracle or mystery plays.

The fact that the texts of these plays are in local, vernacular languages and that they were performed and financed by laity rather than the priesthood, points to them being part of a programme of educational outreach aimed at the community at large. In our own postindustrial age, Medieval drama is popular for historical rather than educational purposes. Nowadays students of this kind of theatre learn from its form rather than its content, as a piece in the puzzle of the development of modern theatre.

Likewise, the few surviving plays of the Greek and Roman world offer the same kind of interest, as well as having acquired an additional cachet with the help of Freudian psychology.

Classical drama, unlike its medieval counterpart, seems to have had little or no didactic purpose. Although it originated in ritual performance and recitation at the festival of Dionysus, its original material was stories so familiar to the audience that they did not need to be told in their entirety.

However, all ancient performance, like its medieval counterpart, was firmly rooted in a religious setting. Even the gladiatorial combats of Rome were dedicated to the gods of the underworld; every play from the loftiest Sophoclean tragedy to the lowest Atellanean farce was connected with some holy day or occasion.

The acting out of events, true or imagined, creatively re-presented them and made them real in a way that mimicked original creativity of the gods. This is why Greeks believed all artists to be divinely inspired and why Geoffrey Chaucer was looked at askance for calling himself an "author" -- after all the only author was God. In 1576, the Protestant religious in England establishment banned the performance of all religious drama as idolatry.

How did Greek and Roman civilization come by the idea that artistic activity and especially performance mirrored or recreated the original creativity of the gods? There is good evidence to suggest that they took this idea, or at least refined it, from their contact with the much older civilization of Pharaonic Egypt.

The notion of a creator god forming the world like an artist or enacting it into being is common in the texts and pictures of this civilization, but Egyptian drama has proved elusive. Where should we look for it?

In 1973, the British Egyptologist H. W. Fairman published a play script called The Triumph of Horus. It was based on an inscription from an Egyptian temple of the second century BCE, a period when Egypt was ruled by the Ptolemies, a Macedonian Greek family descended from one of the generals of Alexander the Great.

Based at their capital city of Alexandria, these rulers not only encouraged emigration from the Greek world to Egypt, but also heavily patronized the local temples to keep the Egyptians on side. They rebuilt many shrines, especially those of the most popular gods: Osiris, Isis and Horus.

Osiris, king, was murdered by his brother Set, who chopped his body up into pieces and hid them. Isis, his wife and sister, reconstructed Osiris. His son Horus later battled Set for vengeance, and achieved recognition as the legitimate king, while his father governed the underworld. This story draws on the universal appeal of family love and solidarity, as well as the triumph of good over evil.

It also has a political twist in that Horus was the god of kingship; every ruler of Egypt was his incarnation. The temple of Horus at Edfu, where the text of The Triumph of Horus was found, was a shrine to the legitimacy of the Ptolemaic rulers as Horus son of Osiris. The walls are covered in texts showing the coronation of the king and his acceptance by the gods of Egypt as well as descriptions of important festivals that took place in the temple every year.

The Triumph of Horus was part of a celebration called the Feast of Victory that took place in late winter or early spring and depicted the victory of Horus over Set and the forces of evil (and by implication the victory of the actual kings over the forces of invasion and rebellion). Fairman had long believed that this text was a play -- as opposed to a liturgical performance -- with stage directions, a cast, lines and even a chorus patterned after Greek drama.

In 1968 and 1971, two performances using Fairman's text were staged in England, and he published the script in 1973. However, no other performance that I know of occurred until 4:30 in the afternoon on April 7, 1998, when students of Vanier College at Toronto's York University, occupied its main public space, Vari Hall Rotunda.

In the Fall of 1997, I began teaching a course on Egypt and the Graeco-Roman world with Classicist Paul Swarney at York. We chose not to focus on Ancient Egypt in its glory days -- the age of the Pyramids (as revealed in recent show at the Royal Ontario Museum) or of Tut and Ramesses -- but on a later period.