Audience response
One reason for choosing Winterbourne Barn as the venue for our main gala performance was its established status as a local heritage and arts venue. It hosts a programme of musical, dramatic, and educational events that often emphasise medieval culture, and attracts an audience from the local and wider south Gloucestershire area who sit outside both the world of university experts and the Bristol theatre scene. CH was particularly interested in trying to attract an audience for the play with an existing relationship with the performance venue and local community, as a proxy for the kind of familiarity medieval audiences might be assumed to have had with the halls that hosted this kind of feast-based performance. In practice, while some of the audience were previous visitors to Winterbourne Barn, more tickets were sold to people associated with the University of Bristol. A village audience who see the Barn as a community centre was hard to reach and perhaps non-existent, making a modern proxy for a medieval guild difficult to find: in fact, the audience at Le Port were probably the closest to a community in a community centre, as the café-arts venue has many ‘regulars’; on the other hand, many of the audience for the Le Port staging were academics visiting for the SITM conference – itself a community, but here a visiting, not a local, one.
Nevertheless, the Winterbourne audience on a sunny evening in late June seemed in high spirits, and the provision of a meal and (optionally alcoholic) drink as part of the ticket price created a convivial mood that may have resembled the original performance atmosphere (the audience mood at the METh and SITM performances was also convivial, as might be expected from a group of academics who are in many cases also longstanding friends, but the afternoon scheduling ensured a more subdued atmosphere). The novelty of the Barn’s historical setting for an audience of enthusiasts for medieval culture helped to heighten expectations. We took the decision to offer the audience very little historical and contextual information about The Life of Job. The programme said only this:
‘The Life of Job’ is a medieval version of the story of the biblical Book of Job: Job is a rich and virtuous man, until God allows Satan to tempt him with a series of misfortunes.
Tonight’s performance is being staged as part of a University of Bristol project on poems that retold biblical stories in medieval England. ‘The Life of Job’ was written in the fifteenth century, and survives in just one manuscript, now in the Huntington Library in California. It seems to have been written to be performed at a celebratory feast, perhaps a guild’s annual gathering, which might have been held somewhere like Winterbourne Barn.
We did not explain how the poem differed from the Bible, give more than the broadest outline of its story, prompt the audience to consider particular aspects of the performance significant or spectacular, or suggest what moral messages it might have been designed to communicate. Our aim was to explore what audiences saw as important and enjoyable if they were not given any direction, and what meanings they might draw from the play for themselves.
In post-performance questionnaires, we asked the audience for demographic information, to rate their enjoyment of the performance and its various elements, and to evaluate their immersion. They were given space to comment on what they would remember most, and what they thought the message or moral might be. Detailed analysis of the questionnaires will appear in a separate article by Cathy Hume, Iain Gilchrist, and Felix Carter, but a few overall patterns stood out. The respondents were unanimously positive about their experience, using words such as ‘lovely’, ‘fun’, ‘wonderful’, ‘brilliant’, and ‘fantastic’; there were many positive comments about the barn setting and food; the music and acrobatics were particularly praised, as well as the participatory elements of the dance and balloons. The overall meaning of The Life of Job was understood somewhat differently by different respondents. To cite a few examples: it was the importance, or difficulty, of patience, perseverance, or faith; the importance of pleasing God; the precarious nature of good fortune; the pointlessness of resistance; the brevity of life; or the proximity of Satan.
A few respondents commented on how they imagined they compared with the original medieval audience, suggesting that there would have been ‘more interaction between actors and audience’ if they had been ‘familiar with each other’; that the original audience would have been less ‘polite’ and ‘inhibited’ and that by contrast the modern audience were insufficiently ‘noisy’ and disinclined to ‘let themselves go’. They were, perhaps, unduly influenced by CH’s safety warning that there would be acrobatics in the middle of the space, and that they should stay seated for the duration of the performance. Indeed, at Winterbourne many of the acrobatic stunts, including moments such as the dramatic collapse of the house, happened in very close proximity to the audience, giving these moments an impact that was reflected in excited comments in the questionnaires. Although there were no formal questionnaires distributed at Le Port, conversations with audience members suggested that the acrobats were an even more dominant point of interest here: in the open-air venue, the music seemed quieter and drew less attention, and the lack of a dais for Job’s feasting table meant that Job and his wife were often much less visible, sometimes hidden behind the acrobats who were very close to the audience and thus drew all the attention. By contrast, the raked audience of the Lecture Hall for the Bristol METh performance made Job and his wife prominent throughout, and this, coupled with the academic nature of the audience who were perhaps more interested in the narrative text of Life of Job than were the gala audience, ensured that the METh audience often commented on Job and his wife, and the action more generally, rather than just the acrobatic stunts – although they certainly also enjoyed these.
However, the Winterbourne audience’s observations on the moral meaning show that they did appreciate that dimension of the play as well as enjoying its more entertaining features. That goes some way to justifying the view that The Life of Job works in performance. During the rehearsal period, and across the three performances, we gained a new sense of the pacing and artistic effects that it achieves – whether played in a Friday night feasting hall, a Monday lunchtime riverside arts centre, or even a Saturday afternoon lecture theatre. Sombre and joyful moments are well balanced; similar actions, whether feasts, deaths, or visits to Job’s dunghill, are repeated enough and with enough variation to have an impact without becoming tedious; and the final movement from Job’s joyous restoration to death is unexpected, and unexpectedly moving.
Universities of Fribourg and Bristol
This chapter 5 is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons licence CC BY NC-ND. Arts and Humanities Research Council grant AH/Y005112/1. The raw questionnaire data is available at https://osf.io/bk38c/. Job’s wife is given little attention by the Old Testament writer but plays a bigger role in the Apocryphal Testament of Job and other texts that draw on the apocryphal tradition. Interestingly, in Islamic tradition, she is also given a more prominent role, and sometimes, as in The Life of Job, is insulted by her husband who is then divinely reprimanded and must repent of his bad treatment of her. See E. Lucy Deacon’s translation of the Taʿziyeh play of The Noble Prophet Ayoub in this volume, and E. Lucy Deacon and Elisabeth Dutton ‘The Hen-pecked Husband and the Suffering Soul: Job/Ayoub and his Wife in Christian and Shi’i Islamic Performance’, forthcoming in Comparative Drama (December 2026). See John Lydgate Mummings and Entertainments edited Claire Sponsler (TEAMS Middle English Texts Series; Kalamazoo MI: Medieval Institute, 2010) 60–62. This description is inscribed on the Castle of Perseverance stage plan: see the image and transcription at <https://metseditions.org/read/Pb13wVAhpEk3F4gLcYD82cXZPxQvj1V>. By contrast, Elisabeth used projections of woodcut illustrations for a 2015 production, with Meg Twycross and Tamara Haddad, of The Historie van Jan van Beverly to draw attention to the status of the performance as an animation of the early printed text. See Elisabeth Dutton and Tamara Haddad ‘The Historie van Jan van Beverley: precedents for the sensational story of rape, murder, and a hairy hermit’ in Medieval Saints: Proceedings of the 2015 Harlaxton Symposium edited Susan Powell (Harlaxton Medieval Studies 27; Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2017) 381–98. In Steve Rosenberg The Recorder Consort I (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1978) item 3. Music in London: BL MS Royal Appendix 58, fol. 5r. While preparing the role, Jed asked whether he should have a ‘character’: if the script had been written by a cleric, ought he to adopt a priestly demeanour, for example? We decided against the adoption of any particular persona that might be distracting or alienating for the audience: the Narrator stands apart from his story, and presents it – rather than himself – to the audience. In The Testament of Job, Job himself comments to his wife that ‘this is a burden we both of us bear together – the loss of our children and possessions’: see the edition in The Apocryphal Old Testament edited H.F.D. Sparks (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984) 617–48. This quotation is from chapter 26, line 3 (633). Mark Larrimore argues that the patience for which Job becomes a byword is more commonly required of those in subordinate positions, like women: Mark Larrimore The Book of Job: a Biography (Princeton UP, 2013) 145–6. See Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter Masks and Masking in Medieval England (Aldershot: Ashgate 2002) 220–3 and Elisabeth Dutton and Lucy Deacon ‘Unmasking the Trans-historical: The Medieval Mysteries and Iranian Ta’ziyeh Compared’, forthcoming in The Drama Review (2026). Lydgate Mummings and Entertainments edited Sponsler (see note 7). The bransle was danced in a line or circle with joined hands, and side-to-side steps.