Lewes Passion Play 2020: an amazing outdoor production for Easter Week

The cast and crew of this year’s Lewes Passion Play are hard at work getting ready for the big Easter week production.
The cast and crew of this year's Lewes Passion PlayThe cast and crew of this year's Lewes Passion Play
The cast and crew of this year's Lewes Passion Play

The free event, which takes place over four different days, starts on Palm Sunday, April 5. The show begins at 2pm in Harvey’s backyard with the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. It then moves through Cliffe High Street and up to the precinct for another section, before heading back to the front yard of Harvey’s for the Temple scene.

The next part is Maundy Thursday, April 9, with two performances at 5.30pm and 8pm. This section includes the betrayal of Jesus and the Last Supper with the play moving indoors for the first time at the Town Hall.

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Next will be the dramatic Good Friday show on April 10 (starting 1pm), where Jesus is put on trial. At the time of writing this section of the play is supposed to take place in the precinct but the venue may change. The crucifixion scene takes place at Southover Grange (2pm).

Cast members of this year's Lewes Passion PlayCast members of this year's Lewes Passion Play
Cast members of this year's Lewes Passion Play

Easter Sunday is on April 12 and explores the resurrection of Jesus, also at Southover Grange.

Artistic director Serena Smith says that the production is a work-in-progress at moment and that her role involves pulling everything together.

“It’s interpreting the script that’s being developed,” she explains. “Then making a vision and making it so it that it works artistically for an audience. So that’s gathering all the people, the casting, creating the costumes together, pulling everything together.”

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“I’ve been a drama teacher all my life,” says Serena. “But this is a very different thing for pulling together because it’s very organic. It grows and grows and grows in terms of people that come onboard. You don’t just have a casting day and then everybody comes along and that’s it.”

“And it changes even more if you have a castle fall down into the area we were going to be performing in.”

Serena is referring, of course, to the collapse of Lewes Castle’s curtain wall in November last year, just one of the bumps in the road of this year’s production.

But, she says, at some point close to the performance time everything has to be locked down and set in place. And it’s important that most of it is performed in the open air.

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“That’s what a Passion Play is,” Serena states. “It’s meant to be a street performance, it’s meant to be something that’s out there.”

“Passion plays are performed all over the world and all over the country, but I think Lewes is fairly unique in that it does go over Holy Week time (with several different parts). I think there are other people that do it but not many.”

“The logistics really are complicated,” she continues. “But at the same time the main challenge is the fact that you’ve got to get lots of people for it to have any impact in the town as it’s street theatre. The bonfire societies have been going for hundreds of years and they’ve built up their numbers. For something like this you’ve got to rely a lot on your church people. But you also need more people than just the church people. The objective is to have it so that anyone could be involved in it and that can be challenging for this type of project in today’s day and age with people not being so faith-minded, shall we say.”

On top of this there are also safe-guarding issues because children are involved. Plus there are risk assessments for pretend crucifixions and the need to take out some insurance for leading a donkey down the street.

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“We’ll have a real donkey (named Hosanna),” Serena confirms, “and we’ll have real doves.”

But all the work is worth it, says Serena: “It has an incredible camaraderie. People share their stories, their life stories, through the process of exploring this story. People with faith and people with no faith in this, and of all ages and abilities. You have a lot of impact within the cast because it enables them to share things that perhaps they wouldn’t have done... and we know that people have turned to faith from the Passion Play. It’s sown a seed in some way.”

Stella Hull, the music director alongside Chrissie Pepper, confirms that the play will use music from many different sources. This, she says, will help create a strong atmosphere and give the play a real sense of the era that the action is taking place in.

“There’s quite a lot of original pieces but also there are pieces from our musical heritage,” she explains. “The pieces are sort of timeless so they could have happened during any period. We use a lot of rounds as the beauty of the round is it can start with one voice and then everybody else can join in.”

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Moving on to the cast, Josh Archer from Eastbourne is enjoying the challenge of playing Jesus.

“I think there’s a lot of...pressure isn’t really the right word,” he says. “There’s a lot resting on me and my interpretation of Jesus. I think everyone has various kind of ways that they think of Jesus, especially as Christians. I’m a Christian as well, and I’ve got my interpretation. I’m just trying to find the true representation of this character but also this figure that is revered and worshiped as he son of God by a large proportion of the world’s population.”

“I really enjoy the garden of Gethsemane speech,” he continues, when asked about his favourite part of the show. “That’s Jesus’s only monologue in the four acts, the four plays that we do, and it really allows me to get in touch with Jesus’s human nature. That’s the moment that he’s at his most vulnerable and that’s been great.”

Alasdair Tenquist takes on the double-challenge of playing the narrator St Mark and the disciple St Matthew.

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“St Mark is very much on the outside because he wasn’t a contemporary disciple so he kind of stands apart and he’s looking in on his own gospel as it’s being relayed,” Alasdair says. “I have some quite long individual soliloquies so I have to make sure I don’t dry up in the middle of those.”

“For me the wonderful experience is the way this group gels together around that framework of the gospel being reenacted and of those four days. You become a part of it and you really empathise with being Matthew. You know: ‘I’ve got this line, but what was he thinking in first century AD, Roman occupied Palestine?’ ‘What was going through his head when he actually said that? Was he frightened or was he confident?’”

Alasdair, who is passionate about his faith, feels that this play is a great reminder of the Easter story too.

“I know people say ‘oh, look a the cross it’s awful, it’s a form of execution’, but it’s not about that. It’s about the joy that comes after and that’s all of our stories. We all carry crosses and then we have to come through them and find the joy beyond the cross. For me it’s taking people into that story and then out the other side and saying ‘yes, you will face difficulties, you will face suffering and pain but actually you can come through like Jesus with his help’, in my view.”

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One of the youngest main performers in the show is Wilfrid Watson, 16, who plays Judas while his mother Zoe Watson plays Mary mother of Jesus.

Wilfrid says: “It’s very exciting because it’s such a complex role and quite pivotal to the story. I also want to get audience to sympathise with him a bit. I think that will be a challenge but if I do that it will add more depth to his story.”

Zoe says: “It’s a huge privilege and a bit daunting. It’s been tricky getting the balance of Mary’s gentleness and also the anxiety and worry and shadow she’s under. It’s quite tricky because you don’t want to swing too much one way, but I’ve been really enjoying working with Serena to get the right balance.”

“I think it’s lovely seeing so many different generations and people from different backgrounds,” she says of the production as a whole. “I think we both thought when we went to the first workshop and auditioned that it was the friendliest audition we’d ever been to because people were so welcoming and encouraging.”

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People still have time to get involved, come to rehearsals and get some excellent drama coaching. Visit www.lewespassionplay.org to find out more or email [email protected].

The whole of Lewes is invited to the performances and can join in the action in the centre of town as the story unfolds.

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