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About 'THE MYSTERIES' The Mysteries opened in June 2001, and within a day of the first reviews the show had sold out. Over the next twelve months THE MYSTERIES toured festivals in Australia, America and Canada, then returned to the UK for a sell-out run in London's West End and a UK tour. Rarely in the world of theatre does a company appear to such instant and universal acclaim.
Dimpho Di Kopane is a lyric theatre company consisting of thirty fabulously talented South African actors and singers. The name Dimpho Di Kopane means "combined talents" in Sotho, aptly describing the way in which the company works; relying on each individual artist's unique skills as well as their collective focus and energy to perform work of the highest caliber.
WHAT IS A MYSTERY PLAY? MYSTERY PLAYS were the
climax of the annual festive round managed by the civic authorities of
late medieval cities. Their organisation was delegated to the guilds,
or 'mysteries', elite organisations which existed to protect the
professional skills of craft or trade. The plays evolved as part of the
Church's summer feasts and holy-days: Corpus Christi in York and
Coventry, and Whitsun, later Midsummer, in Chester. They presented
their audiences with a dramatised summary of the highlights of the
Christian story which the Church celebrated throughout the year,
beginning with the Creation, ending with Doomsday, and focusing on the
Passion. Their development at the beginning of the fifteenth century
marks the maturing of the British Isles as an urban mercantile economy
in the period of recovery after the Black Death.
Each
guild produced its pageant on a wagon, stopping in sequence to perform
at a designated number of 'stations' around a processional route, a
good way to bring an epic production to a large audience. These wagons
were elaborate vehicles, some requiring multiple stories and winches.
The play texts were written by several different authors, almost
certainly clerics, in a variety of forms, but the cycles cohere because
of broad patterns drawn from popular worship and its representation in
contemporary art. Like all medieval literature, the plays are in the
dialect version of the language which predominated in the region to
which they belonged, but the texts have great tonal variety from high
seriousness to knock-about farce. Not much is known of the performers,
who were, according to any modern understanding, amateurs. All parts,
including Eve and the Virgin Mary, seem to have been played by men.
Contemporary records show that costumes, beards, wigs, haloes and
gilded full-face masks, as well as elaborate sets and music, were
usual.
Mystery plays served a number of social and cultural functions, the least of these being pious instruction. Cast and audience alike knew the story, but to take it out on to the streets and enact it lavishly on a holiday affirmed both the wealth and the piety of everyone involved and validated the commercial activity of the city in the eyes of God. Pamela M. King,
Professor of English at St Martin's College, Lancaster, and current President of the Société Internationale pour l'Étude du Théâtre Médiéval To find out more about current research on the York Cycle of mystery plays and modern productions, including the Festival of Britain revival, visit the website of York Doomsday Project:- http://www.lancs.ac.uk/users/yorkdoom/
SOUTH AFRICAN LANGUAGES THE MYSTERIES uses the four main languages of South Africa and some of the less widely used. Of the four main languages: AFRIKAANS
has its roots in Dutch but has been influenced by English, Malay,
German, French, Portuguese and some indigenous languages. It is an
"official" language of South Africa and is the mother tongue of about
15% of the population. ENGLISH is the
language of government and the legal and educational systems. It has
been spoken in South Africa since the 1790s and is understood by the
vast majority of the population. XHOSA (SIXHOSA),
originally the mother tongue of people in the former Transkei, Ciskei
and Eastern Cape regions, is now the mother tongue of about 17.5% of
the population. It is notable for its use of three distinct 'click'
sounds - the dental, represented by the letter 'c', the palatal,
represented by 'q' and the lateral, represented by 'x'. ZULU (SIZULU)
was originally the language of a prominent group of the Nguni people
and is now spoken throughout South Africa. It is the mother tongue of
about 22.5% of the population. Like Sixhosa, it has three 'click'
sounds, represented by the same letters.
© Heritage Theatre Ltd.
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