Developing the production

Job’s herds and flocks were represented by plastic toy animals that were first brought on by the acrobats acting as Job’s children: they were arranged along the front of the dining table and in the performance Job mimed teaching his children to count with them. But when Satan began Job’s ‘persecucion’ (line 36), the acrobats grabbed the animals and juggled them with increasing speed and violence, before dropping them all to the floor at once to symbolise their theft and slaughter. Following this Satan brings a storm that demolishes the house of Job’s eldest son, crushing all Job’s children (‘the house downe dressid | And all the children of Job therin were oppressed’, lines 62–3): this dramatic scene was enacted by Tamar, Harry, and Marcus with a stepladder and plank which they first used to construct a feasting house, and then collapsed to the floor (see Figs 7 and 4). Satan then attacks Job’s own body by smiting him with plagues and violent wounds that leave ‘brode scabbes’ which miraculously turn to gold when Job uses them to pay a group of musicians (lines 123–4). The wounds were realised using red felt balls with which the acrobats pelted Job, who was wearing a Velcro vest to which they stuck (see Fig. 8): when Job paid the musicians, a juggling trick replaced the red balls with gold ones.

The musicians selected historic pieces, mostly chosen more for their mood than their relevance to fifteenth-century London or the Job story specifically. A twelfth-century French tune, ‘The Nightingale’, was played in the early moments when Job’s family were happy and harmonious, using a recorder and gentle percussion.1 The theme returned when the minstrels visited Job on the dunghill, but played this time on the hurdy-gurdy, for a more antic mood. When Job’s sons were feasting in their house, ‘Ductia’, a thirteenth-century dance tune, was played on high recorders, creating a joyful mood.For an online score see <https://www.scribd.com/document/373263143/Ductia-del-siglo-13-frances>. The ‘Bear Dance’, a catchy circle dance tune that seems to have been popular in the medieval and early modern periods, was used for the dance performed early on by the acrobats as Job’s children and then with audience participation towards the end.2For an online score see <https://thesession.org/tunes/4195>.

By contrast, Satan had a theme played on a crumhorn, ‘Trotto’, a fourteenth-century Italian dance tune, which Kira played with random changes of structure to increase the disturbing, chaotic effect.3In Mittelalterliche Spielmannstänze aus Italien I edited Sebastian Kelber and Josef Ulsamer (Celle: Moeck, n.d.) no. 2510, 7. The mournful tune for the Middle English lyric ‘Westron Wynde’ was used when Job’s friends came to visit him in his sickness on the dunghill and for the solemn death section at the end of the performance.4 The carol tune ‘Ther is no rose of swych vertu’ was used to set a more reverent, prayerful tone, and was played on low recorders.See The New Oxford Book of Carols edited Hugh Keyte and Andrew Parrott (Oxford UP, 1992) 82–3.

We used liturgical music for the single moment when the English poem quotes the Latin of the Vulgate: this comes when Job’s children have been killed, and he looks up to God and says: Sicut Domino placuit, factum est ita. | Sit nomen Domini benedictum in secula (‘as it hath pleased the Lord, so is it done: blessed be the name of the Lord forever’: lines 69–70). Kira sang the melody associated with the liturgical chant for the feast of Saint Job that seems to be quoted here: chant 7647 in the Cantus index, using the melody A-KN CCl 1012, which is very similar to other melodies recorded for this chant.5See Cantus Index entry at <https://cantusindex.org/id/007647>.

The three days of collective rehearsal time before the first performance were primarily occupied with the challenges of integrating the elements of action, music, and speech. Where would words or music cue action, and where respond to it? Clear cues were particularly important for the acrobats, for whom it is logistically impossible to rehearse with scripts in hand as actors can, and for whom precisely coordinated movement is essential, for safety as well as for effect. The rehearsal process thus brought into particular focus questions that must always be asked of narrated performances: should the Narrator speak before, after, or during action? The effect of each possibility is quite different for the audience, and there are potential pitfalls to every option, too: broadly speaking, if the action always follows the narration, the action may lose its power because it is anticipated; if the action accompanies or precedes the narration, it may make the narration itself seem redundant or dull.

In principle, it might seem best to vary the approach, and indeed we experimented with this in rehearsal: in practice, however, we found that the narration usually needed either to anticipate or to accompany action, and that the creative and often spectacular nature of the action obviated any problem of predictability: indeed, one could almost sense the audience’s curious anticipation – ‘how will they make a house collapse?’ – and the satisfaction as anticipation was more than adequately rewarded.

Where the action required more time than the lines allowed, the Narrator would simply pause, and the musicians would accompany the action to its close. The Narrator was thus very much in control of the action of the piece: Jed Trimnell, who filled the role, proved in rehearsal to be exceptionally quick at grasping cues and timing and, as he also carried a script (marking him as the teller of an already textual story, rather than the creator of the narrative), he was soon subtly prompting his fellow performers through nods and (figurative) winks that were entirely appropriate to his narratorial role. In performance, he moved freely around the action, commenting on it with benign concern or humour as the moment demanded, both guiding and mirroring audience responses.6 As we used the Middle English text, much rested on Jed’s excellent capacity to make the narrative clear to the audience – and indeed to those of the performers who were not medievalists.

The Narrator did not, however, seem entirely omniscient: an intriguing effect of the fact that Job and Job’s wife each spoke a few lines of their own was that they seemed to have an inner life beyond the narration, while still being trapped within the – often violent and traumatic – action described and played out around them. It was, however, difficult to manage the reactions of Job and his wife to the tragic events unfolding, because the text repeatedly requires them to respond not to the events as they happen, but to the subsequent report of those events by a messenger figure. This seemed at odds with the choice which we felt the text otherwise invited, to make Job and his wife feasters at a table like the audience, and therefore witnesses, with the audience, of events as they are narrated and acted out. This timing problem compounded the challenge that Anthony and Aurélie already faced, of performing reactions to great tragedies often without any lines. In the event, we chose moments for them to freeze during their feasting, making clear that they were not watching certain events: they then unfroze in response to the various messages of doom, and the audience was able to observe their reactions. Possibly, the writer’s choice to present messengers coming to Job was motivated by a desire to allow the audience to watch Job’s reactions: had the Job performer only responded to events as they happened, the audience, watching first the spectacular acrobatic action, may not have noticed Job’s response.

At other moments Anthony and Aurélie acted in ways that the script, and thus the Narrator, did not explicitly require. In the final verse of The Life of Job, after Job has been restored to health, wealth, and happiness, the tone shifts somewhat, acquiring something of a memento mori tone – death approaches Job, as it must us all:

We decided to indicate Job’s death by having him leave his feasting table and move towards the stepladder that symbolised God’s presence and therefore heaven. Job’s wife is unmentioned, but in rehearsal we realised that Job’s ‘death’ would then leave his wife alone behind the feasting table, giving her a role in the final tableau that did not seem warranted by the text. We therefore decided that Job’s wife should first take her own leave of him on the line ‘Dethe sparith no creature’, kissing him affectionately on the forehead as she left the playing area carrying their child: this initially pragmatic decision in fact created a moment that audiences commented was particularly moving, especially in the Lecture Theatre performance where Job and his wife were more clearly visible throughout. The poignancy was partly because of the grace with which Aurélie performed it, and partly because of the appearance of the charming real baby, Percy; perhaps, however, the effect of the action was also intensified by its occurring beyond the Narrator’s comment or control – death comes to all, including Job’s wife, and perhaps is sometimes quiet and intimate.

Of course, actors should not expect to be able to approach a medieval text in the same way as a contemporary play – it would make little sense to try to ‘method act’ the protagonist of The Life of Job.7Philip Butterworth argues that in discussing medieval theatre it is important to avoid contemporary theatrical terms (such as ‘actor’) where possible, since they ‘run the risk of imposing modern theatrical consciousness on medieval conditions’: Philip Butterworth Staging Conventions in Medieval English Theatre (Cambridge UP, 2014) 1. Nonetheless, staging a play requires consideration of its action and the ethics and motivations of its characters, and in the Life of Job these raise questions that mirror those that the biblical Book of Job has always invited. Early commentators observed that Job’s wife endures everything Job does,8 but the scriptural book pays no attention to her suffering. The Life of Job follows apocryphal tradition in giving Job’s wife a voice of protest, and Aurélie developed this by portraying, through her gestures, an increasing sense of betrayal in the face of her husband’s stubborn piety and lack of response to the loss of their children. In The Life of Job, indeed, God reprimands Job for only one thing: his mistreatment of his wife. To make sense of this reprimand, Anthony spoke his only direct address to Aurélie – ‘Folysshe woman! I counsell thee: be styll’ (line 97) – with considerable anger, and we highlighted the encounter by moving it out from behind the feasting table and towards the audience. Similarly, in order to justify God’s ‘sore rebuke’ to Job’s friends ‘for theire unrightfull speche | Whiche thei to Job spake by many dyvers argumentis, Contrarye to Goddes will’ (lines 149–51), we had to present them in combative, rather than philosophically pious, light. In the staging processes, then, we were to some extent trying to fill some of interpretive gaps that are left by both The Life of Job and the scriptural book on which it is based.

The biblical Book of Job explores the problem of suffering, and why God allows bad things to happen to good people: the exploration deploys an antagonist, Satan, ‘the adversary’, who is ‘a sort of prosecuting attorney in the divine court, who, whether by temperament or profession, is sceptical regarding the possibility of genuine human piety’ but who is not yet a demonic figure or personification of evil.9Larrimore The Book of Job 1. In the biblical book, Satan is also one of ‘the sons of God’, understood by Aquinas, at least, to mean ‘angels’. In The Life of Job, by contrast, he is the ‘tortuose serpent’, ‘oure auncient enemy of hell’, who destroys beasts and servants alike with ‘rancor so fell’ and ‘irefull violence’ (lines 43–6), and smites Job with ‘plages and wondys right vervent’, ‘Lyke a furiouse Tyger and wode serpent’ (lines 88–90).We foregrounded Satan as the driver of all the acts of destruction, having Annika, now no longer in a two-high, in black cloak and mask, dancing like a tiger or a snake through each one (see Fig. 8). But the invention of Satan, even the evil, hostile Satan of the Life of Job, does not really explain God’s motivation in allowing the testing of Job, and the violent destruction of his children and animals remains even more difficult to justify. These theological questions informed our consideration of a dramaturgical problem: how do we imagine God, and how can we present God theatrically?

We know that performers in medieval England did readily put God onstage: we know that they used masks or gold face paint to create distance between the human actor and the divinity he presented, and skilful lighting effects to reflect divine radiance.10 The Life of Job does not give God any direct speech – His reprimands of Job and Job’s friends are indirectly reported through the Narrator; we therefore felt at first that it was unnecessary to have an actor presenting God, especially given our limited cast size. However, it seemed potentially helpful to locate God somewhere in the playing space so that Job could direct his prayers to Him, and we decided to use the stepladder that also represented the house of Job’s children: we wrapped it in an ornate episcopal cope and wired a ‘face’ to its top bar – a full-face mask in matt gold, with a sparkling gold filigree eye mask attached to it. The passive, unmoving God presence that resulted was an appropriate realisation of the divine as He appears in The Life of Job, and in rehearsal seemed sufficiently visually compelling.

In the first performance, however, the limitations imposed on the performance space by the large podium pinned the ‘God’ stepladder into a corner where it became visually confused with the AV equipment and Job’s feasting table, from which it could not be adequately distanced (see Fig. 2). Not all audience members realised what the stepladder symbolised. For the performance in the Winterbourne Barn we therefore developed an opening sequence to establish the identity of the stepladder God: before the Narrator spoke, the two-high Satan encountered, and was defeated by, a two-high God wearing the robe and mask (see Fig. 9) that were subsequently placed on the stepladder.

This created a visually arresting beginning to the performance, and helped establish the divine identity, although it created a new problem: for safety reasons, the acrobat, Harry, could not wear the full face mask, as it limited his vision, and the filigree eye mask was insufficient to disguise Harry’s rather cheeky demeanour – the nature of the God projected was therefore temporarily changed. Once the masks and cloak had been put onto the stepladder, however, God became once again passive and unmoving, and in the larger performance space of the barn was positioned at a distance from Job’s feasting table, remote and uninvolved. A halo of LED lights was added to give a divine glow for the evening performance in the darker space of the Barn (visible in the background of Fig. 6).

We also experimented, in the Barn, with using an additional prop to create God – a wooden triangular frame that had been used to create a floral arch for weddings. The acrobats did not then need to dismantle and then reassemble ‘God’ in order to use the stepladder for the collapsing house of the sons of Job. However, the result was, interestingly, that ‘God’ seemed inadequate and makeshift, rather than the result of an ingenious re-purposing of a prop. We therefore returned to the stepladder God, and integrated its dismantling into the action: immediately before the collapsing house, the acrobats brought ‘God’ from its position far behind Job’s feasting table and positioned it centre stage, in front of the table, while Job and his family knelt to pray to it – it was then correctly positioned to be turned, with the removal of cloak and mask and the addition of a cross-plank, into a two-storey house, which could then fall down and crush Job’s sons. A potential implication of this object ‘doubling’ – God’s responsibility for the destruction of Job’s family – was probably unnoticed by the audience.

One aspect of The Life of Job that strongly hinted at performance was its culmination in a scene of spectacular gift-giving and generous hospitality. The ingredients for this scene are there in the biblical Book of Job when Job’s fortunes are restored: God ‘gave Job twice as much as he had before’, and his friends and family gather to break bread together, with everyone present giving Job one ewe and one golden earring (42:10–11). Immediately before this moment, God orders Job’s friends to ‘offer holocaust’ to Job, who will then pray on their behalf (42:8). In the poem, this becomes a slightly confusing sequence of events where Job’s friends first make him ‘oblacion and offerynge’ (line 156), God then restores Job’s ‘best, gode, and lond … dobyll’ (lines 160–1), and everyone present at the feast gives Job ‘grete yftes … that weren aureall’ (line 165). Job, in turn, offers ‘gretter hospitalité’ (line 167) than ever before in the context of a ‘ryall feest’ (line 162).

This suggested to us a spectacular staging of gift-giving and a profusion of wealth, similar to the ritual gift-giving that forms part of Lydgate’s three roughly contemporary mummings: those at Eltham, for the Mercers of London, and for the Goldsmiths of London.11 In those cases, the recipient of the gifts was the king (Eltham) or the mayor of London (Mercers and Goldsmiths); here, within the drama, Job is the primary recipient. However, the gift-giving is less straightforward than this suggests. In the Vulgate, God’s command is that Job’s friends should offer ‘holocaust’ to him, and that he in turn should pray on their behalf. Presumably, when the Book of Job was written, this signified to its Jewish audience that the friends presented Job with animals to be sacrificially burned, or paid him for the sacrifice. This would not be part of fifteenth-century English Christian tradition, and the poet represents this moment rather vaguely with ‘oblacion and offerynge’.

In performance, we initially staged this moment with the giving of small gold-coloured objects – candlesticks, goblets, and caskets – before a question from Jed about the meaning of the word holocaust caused us to revisit it. Clearly the word holocaust now carries specific and horrific associations, unintended by the medieval poet, who simply meant to describe a burned offering. However, Jed’s question prompted us to have the acrobats, representing Job’s friends, present the toy sheep and cows from earlier in the performance as sacrificial offerings at this moment, and then to give Job the golden objects in the next episode, to represent ‘grete yftes … that weren aureall’. These gifts, though, did not convey a sense of extravagant abundance, and for that we used a hamper full of golden balloons, thrown by the Narrator and by Job to the audience: making the audience as well as Job recipients of gifts, albeit only temporarily, as the balloons were batted backwards and forwards around the room in a moment of exuberant fun. Perhaps, as originally performed, an honoured guest would have received gifts alongside or after the performer playing Job: imaginative staging might have allowed for some flexibility of the kind we introduced.

The Life of Job ends with the death of Job, and his soul’s ascent to heaven. The final verse (cited above) is nowhere suggested by the scriptural Book of Job, and indeed seems far more medieval than biblical, a memento mori that readily suggested our production should conclude with a Dance of Death in which all creatures ‘of high or low degré’ should indeed be involved. Our small cast (nine, including the musicians) could not readily form an impressive procession of all creatures, but we thought that audience participation at this point would both increase procession length and emphasise what The Life of Job arguably tries to make its take-home message – that we should all prepare our souls for death. This message follows rather hard on the heels of several verses describing the feasting and celebration that attend Job’s restoration to health, wealth, and happiness: because we wanted the audience also to be directly involved in this celebration, we decided that audience members should be invited to join a party dance, conga-style, that could then evolve into a more sombre danse macabre. In the event, neither the lecture hall which held our first performance nor Winterbourne Barn allowed space for a conga snake; Le Port had the space, but the arrangement of the audience, many at small tables, would have made movement among or around the audience difficult. In all cases the acrobats stayed in the main playing space and led a line of members of the audience in a simple bransle-style dance.12 Once this joyful dance was sufficiently established, and all members of the audience drawn into the party by Jed, who continued to pelt them with gold balloons, a shift of mood in the music was the cue for the acrobats to put on death masks and slowly lead their audience dancers in a procession of the dead. In all performances, audiences assumed that the joyful dance was the finale, and applauded – a response that, while challenging for the performers to handle, increased the power of the unexpected shift to the sombre mood of the ending.