I was honored to give a short lecture/discussion on Saturday afternoon before Acacia’s performance of The House by the Stable and Grab & Grace. This post is drawn from my notes for that talk.
How many of you have ever gotten married? Been in a wedding? Attended a Catholic mass? A state funeral? a magic show? Performed a magic show? Been initiated into a secret society? (Okay, you can’t tell me that).
Those are all instances of ritual, of ceremony.
The author of today’s play was in love with ritual and ceremony. He thought everything was more than it appears to be. Love is heaven, work is the city of God, he and his friends were characters in a great Myth. So it makes sense that he would turn to some of the lofty verse forms of Medieval drama when he was asked to write a play. Theater is basically ceremony turned into Art. What you’ll see today is a dramatization of the great ritual myth of temptation, fall, and redemption played out simultaneously on the grand scale of all humanity and in the private life of one Man who comes to know a certain Baby in a manger.
Who, then, was this writer? [Here I gave a quick bio of CW]. Why did CW write this play?
- The Oxford Pilgrim Players commissioned House by the Stable in the fall of 1939, between the declaration of war and Christmas. It seems like a challenge to provide some kind of consolation in those horrible months! It was on a Christmas double-bill with The Death of Good Fortune.
- Williams was staying in Oxford in the home of Anne and Ruth Spalding, sisters in their 20s whose parents were away in America. He’d been evacuated from London due to the Blitz. Ruth Spalding was the director of Oxford Pilgrim Players and a remarkable young woman: an actor, director, author, TV script-writer, scholar, and teacher.
- As I’ve already written elsewhere, CW turned to Medieval precedents for House by the Stable, blending the Mystery Play (about the life of Christ) and the Morality Play (with allegorical virtues and vices).
- What is Allegory? It’s symbolism on a large scale. Two stories running at once: the surface plot and characters, then the abstract realities they symbolize underneath. Or maybe I should say that the other way around. C. S. Lewis says that to write allegory, “you can start with an immaterial fact, such as the passions which you actually experience, and can then invent visibilia to express them.” In other words, there’s the surface story—the “visible” one, the obvious story with characters, places, and events—and then there’s the “immaterial” stuff it symbolizes. Archetypes. But also themselves. So ask yourself what’s the surface story and what it symbolizes.
- CW didn’t join the Inklings until 1939, six years before his death. He read House by the Stable to them on the same day CSL read from The Problem of Pain, and JRRT read from “The Council of Elrond” chapter of Fellowship of the Ring (Lindop 309). All of these are in one way or another about how to fight evil, how to endure suffering.
Then I gave an intro to some of CW’s key ideas:
– Coinherence
– Wasteland theme
– Arthuriana, mythology
– Mary as submitted saint or Jedi master
I closed with CW’s belief that theatre could actually evoke spiritual change in its audience members. entering a sacred ceremonial space, being open to conviction, encouragement, or inspiration.
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