Everyman
St. Andrew’s Hall, Norwich
Simon Callow’s musical miracle plays well in Norwich
Richard Morrison: The Times: May 9th, 2003
The lamentable decline of hellfire preaching and public self-flagellation has left productions of medieval morality plays looking lurid, even voyeuristic. Not often on the modern stage do you see a chap lash himself into a lather of fake blood to escape purgatory. Nor do many contemporary dramas offer the uncompromising thesis that your good deeds are being totted up for the great Day of Reckoning when you either get fried in Hell or feted in Heaven.
At least you knew where you stood, theologically, in the Middle Ages. Or perhaps terrifying morality plays such as Everyman were just cynical devices for keeping peasants docile, leaving the barons free to enjoy the fruits of wickedness.
Either way, the drama still packs a punch, especially when presented as starkly and literally as in Simon Callow’s production for the Norfolk & Norwich Festival. Callow himself played God, working up a right old vengeful tizzy from his lofty throne. But the bulk of the action was carried by the amateurs of Maddermarket Theatre in Norwich, now flourishing in its 82nd year under Clare Goddard’s leadership.
There was nothing amateurish about their performances. Performing in the round on a small drum stage cheerily festooned with a black-draped coffin, the leads – particularly David Reeve’s Everyman and Emma Wyatt’s Knowledge – declaimed their dread-filled lines with compelling clarity.
What drew me to Norwich, though, was the music. For the first time in Britain, Sibelius’s score to accompany Everyman (or rather, a 1916 Helsinki production of Hoffmansthal’s wordy German adaptation, Jedermann) was performed in the context of the original play – the result of the London Mozart Player’s imaginative decision to appoint Callow as their “theatrical advisor”.
In the event, the brooding Romantic music often sounded too overblown for this style of theatre. Its tolling bells and trembling strings were aptly melodramatic as Everyman approached his coffin, and some eerie divided-string passages gripped the ear by virtue of their near-atonal weirdness, if nothing else.
But one would hate to have partied with Sibelius if his idea of a good time was the morose song and dreary two-part choral canon he supplied for the scene in which Everyman cavorts with his drinking chums. Still, full marks to the LMP, conductor Andrew Parrot, the Norwich Choir Viva Voce and two vibrant young soloists – mezzo Jennifer Johnston and baritone Thomas Blunt – for resuscitating such a rarity. Doubtless this good deed will stand them in good stead on the Day of Reckoning.
