![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
A Sleep of Prisoners
Mar. 1st, 2016 01:54 pmIn 1966, the newly formed Peterborough Theatre Guild bought the ruins of St. Luke's Anglican Church, which had burned down in 1959. (The parish had decided to rebuild on a different site somewhat to the south.) As its first production it put on Christopher Fry's A Sleep of Prisoners, directed by Fern Rahmel ("Miss Rahmel" to those of us who went to PCVS), using the not-fully-reconstructed body of the church (it followed up by doing a full reconstruction: during my days in Peterborough, beginning in 1970, it was recognizably based in a building which had been a church, but it was by no means "a ruined church"). A connection who was at the first performance remembers that one could still smell the smokiness of the burned timbers.
Trent University's archives have a copy of a script for ASOP from Rahmel's papers with director's notes. I have a copy a the first edition from Rahmel's library with light notes which indicate that it was also a director's copy.
Flash forward fifty years. Last year a member of my parish (St. Mary Magdalene's, Toronto) who is also a professional actor and director (Alistair Martin Smith) floated the idea of directing a play there, with the inevitable Murder in the Cathedral as a suggestion. Now I like the Eliot play and consider it an important piece of work -- but it is regularly covered in parish dramas, so I suggested A Sleep of Prisoners instead.
He took this suggestion up. Feeling responsible, I got myself pulled in as one of the actors...
It is likely to be a mildly interesting production. My view of the play is that it shows different perspectives shed on an essentially static set of figures chosen by Fry as types -- a man of action but little reflection; a man of reflection with little aptitude for action or "normal" interactions (he's not obviously Autism spectrum but he could be played that way); a practical figure whose authority comes from his position (Corporal among Privates); and an older man who has inherent authority as a result of experience and temperament. Martin Smith's view is less static, and his presentation also departs from the model given in the script's stage directions.
Fry is an interesting figure. He never appears on "great writers" lists, but he has a substantial body of work with a consistently high level of accomplishment. He's visibly influenced by Eliot's later work (dramatic and non-dramatic) but is in no way a Modernist in approach.
Like Eliot, Sayers, and Williams he wrote "religious verse drama", if by that one means dramas with events in church history or biblical narratives as topics: The Boy with a Cart, A Sleep of Prisoners, The Firstborn, Thor, with Angels, arguably Curtmantle and One Thing More; The Tower is on the history of Tewkesbury Abbey and was commissioned by them but does not seem to be in print or accessible. However, his focus is on human rather than divine action (he was a Quaker by conversion, C. of E. by birth) and many of them seem to me to be in intention explorations of scenes in a common English history where religion is one thread. (One exception is Thor, With Angels, which was written for the Canterbury Festival on commission, in succession with Eliot Murder in the Cathedral, Williams (Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury), and Sayers (The Zeal of Thy House): its focus is on conversion: both individual and the group conversion of Kent by Augustine. It also manages to diverge from history by bringing Merlin onstage.) By contrast, Eliot, Sayers, and Williams all came from one part or another of the High Church spectrum and their works play off sacramental themes.
His most popular plays, like The Lady's Not For Burning, were comedies, not explicitly religious; Fry himself said that he saw little difference between the two sets of plays other than their settings.
He has no successors: the next generation of English dramatists were the Angry Young Men. When they came along he went on to screenwriting (partly big blockbusters like Ben-Hur).
The performances will be on the 11th and 12th of March at 8:00 pm at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene, Toronto.
Trent University's archives have a copy of a script for ASOP from Rahmel's papers with director's notes. I have a copy a the first edition from Rahmel's library with light notes which indicate that it was also a director's copy.
Flash forward fifty years. Last year a member of my parish (St. Mary Magdalene's, Toronto) who is also a professional actor and director (Alistair Martin Smith) floated the idea of directing a play there, with the inevitable Murder in the Cathedral as a suggestion. Now I like the Eliot play and consider it an important piece of work -- but it is regularly covered in parish dramas, so I suggested A Sleep of Prisoners instead.
He took this suggestion up. Feeling responsible, I got myself pulled in as one of the actors...
It is likely to be a mildly interesting production. My view of the play is that it shows different perspectives shed on an essentially static set of figures chosen by Fry as types -- a man of action but little reflection; a man of reflection with little aptitude for action or "normal" interactions (he's not obviously Autism spectrum but he could be played that way); a practical figure whose authority comes from his position (Corporal among Privates); and an older man who has inherent authority as a result of experience and temperament. Martin Smith's view is less static, and his presentation also departs from the model given in the script's stage directions.
Fry is an interesting figure. He never appears on "great writers" lists, but he has a substantial body of work with a consistently high level of accomplishment. He's visibly influenced by Eliot's later work (dramatic and non-dramatic) but is in no way a Modernist in approach.
Like Eliot, Sayers, and Williams he wrote "religious verse drama", if by that one means dramas with events in church history or biblical narratives as topics: The Boy with a Cart, A Sleep of Prisoners, The Firstborn, Thor, with Angels, arguably Curtmantle and One Thing More; The Tower is on the history of Tewkesbury Abbey and was commissioned by them but does not seem to be in print or accessible. However, his focus is on human rather than divine action (he was a Quaker by conversion, C. of E. by birth) and many of them seem to me to be in intention explorations of scenes in a common English history where religion is one thread. (One exception is Thor, With Angels, which was written for the Canterbury Festival on commission, in succession with Eliot Murder in the Cathedral, Williams (Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury), and Sayers (The Zeal of Thy House): its focus is on conversion: both individual and the group conversion of Kent by Augustine. It also manages to diverge from history by bringing Merlin onstage.) By contrast, Eliot, Sayers, and Williams all came from one part or another of the High Church spectrum and their works play off sacramental themes.
His most popular plays, like The Lady's Not For Burning, were comedies, not explicitly religious; Fry himself said that he saw little difference between the two sets of plays other than their settings.
He has no successors: the next generation of English dramatists were the Angry Young Men. When they came along he went on to screenwriting (partly big blockbusters like Ben-Hur).
The performances will be on the 11th and 12th of March at 8:00 pm at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene, Toronto.
