And then \u2013 oh, frabjous day! \u2013 then the new producer brought in the new director, the utterly wonderful and amazing Sam Pullen-Campbell. Sam walked around the proposed performance site, the Abbey Gardens, and saw how it could be done, and said yes, she would do it. That was the day the play took off.<\/p>\n
The next rehearsal actually involved auditioning \u2013 a producer and director looking at you to see what you could do. (And acting exercises, like: put your two index fingers together, rotate one clockwise and the other anticlockwise. \u201cDroopy but you\u2019ve got the right idea,” she told me. \u201cProbably not the first time you\u2019ve been told that,\u201d whispered the future Simon Peter, displaying a shocking lack of reverence towards his former youth leader.) This was 30th<\/sup> January \u2013 a mere, oh, 7.5 weeks before the scheduled performance. Who\u2019s worried?<\/p>\n Courtesy of the Abingdon Passion Play website – www.abingdonpassionplay.org.uk<\/p><\/div>\n Sam imported some of the key roles, not least Jesus himself, from her own contacts. The Man was Chris Young, who is 18 and still at school, but can act 30 better than many 30 year olds. He wants to be a professional and I\u2019ve no doubt he will be. I want to get a t-shirt made saying \u201cI knew Chris Young before he was famous.\u201d [Edited to add: young Chris is now officially Kit Young<\/a> and does indeed already have an impressive career behind and ahead of him.<\/em>]<\/p>\n And we were away. I wasn\u2019t Pilate, I was the Centurion. Well, he had some good lines too. Out of respect and a sense of humanity for whoever ended up with the part I had already changed the John Wayne favourite \u201cSurely this was the Son of God\u201d line to \u201cHe must have been the Son of God,\u201d which is a lot easier to say naturally. Economy of characters meant that he also got the one-liners previously attributed to a couple of walk-on soldier parts, which was even better because it meant I got to channel my inner Michael Caine and tell the High Priest and his entourage that Pilate does not come at the beck and call of a bunch of religious nutters. And I supervised the flogging of Our Lord.<\/p>\n Then came my next unexpected role: soldier coordinator. Soldiers are also quite important to a Passion Play but they were probably the hardest groups to get volunteers for. I mean, for the Apostles all you need is Simon Peter and a cricket team, but the soldiers \u2026<\/p>\n Courtesy of the Abingdon Passion Play website – www.abingdonpassionplay.org.uk<\/p><\/div>\n They were gradually pulled in from left, right and centre, and needed someone to work out their deployments throughout the play. And who better than the Centurion? Apart from anything else, oral directions \u2013 \u201cstand there!\u201d \u2013 could be given, entirely in character. The Abingdon Dojo provided some, others came in bit by bit, one by one; eventually we had a credible squad, including a trained paramedic to take Jesus off the Cross (I know, maybe a bit late for a paramedic but hey \u2026) and a real live Redcap as drummer. Carl S, whose wife said he had never volunteered for anything in 25 years of marriage until this, became the man who flogs Jesus and got so into it that at his first rehearsal I actually had to improvise the command to stop when the lashes got up to 39.<\/p>\n Courtesy of the Abingdon Passion Play website – www.abingdonpassionplay.org.uk<\/p><\/div>\n And so the day approached. Rehearsals soon got to be more than every Wednesday – every Monday, Wednesday and Friday by the end of it. I can\u2019t speak for the others, but I was buzzing. I believed in this. I wanted this. Some of the scenes were so astonishing and powerful they brought tears to the eyes, and I don\u2019t mean just because the Temple Guards threw Jesus to the ground wuffly \u2013 I mean, roughly \u2013 or Carl got a bit too close with the lash. I mean because the words and the story were speaking to us.<\/p>\n St Helen\u2019s and St Michael\u2019s churches lent us their space. Rehearsing in St Michael\u2019s, the highest of the Anglo churches in Abingdon (like, purple clothes over the statues for Lent) meant that when we rehearsed taking Jesus from the Cross and laying him in his mother\u2019s arms, we had a pieta on hand for reference.<\/p>\n The day kept approaching, and we started to look askance at the weather. Palm Sunday 2012 I happen to remember quite clearly, mostly because I spent a lot of it sitting vigil at the bedside of a dying friend in Sobell House. But I also remember being able to sit outside on the terrace and read a book.<\/p>\n Palm Sunday 2013, it soon became clear, was going to be blinkin\u2019 cold, and quite possibly wet \u2026<\/p>\n To be continued!<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I said no at first. Rather, I didn\u2019t say anything, when the casting calls started going out. It sounded like too much hard work. I was in sympathy with the aims; I thought an Abingdon Passion Play would be nice … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/march11th-058.png\" "\\"march11th-058\\"")
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