The Midgley Pace Egg Play: Lockdown edition pt. 2

Followers of this blog will remember Sarah Rose’s entertaining interview with several members of the Midgley Pace Egg Players last year, where the history of both the play and the players was discussed via a Zoom call. Sadly we are still in lockdown, but the play goes on; two performances will be livestreamed on YouTube on Friday 2nd April at 11:15am and 12 noon (the link is available at the end of this post).

Continue reading for a short transcript of a portion of last year’s interview and more information about this year’s performances.

Sarah’s interview was held with Robin (The Doctor), Max (The Fool), Millie (The Black Prince)

Sarah: So does one of you want to tell me a little about the history of the Pace Egg plays generally, and does someone else want to tell me about the history of the Midgley players?

Robin: The Pace Egg plays in general are regarded as Mummer’s plays, a form of Morris dancing and street theatre. The Midgley Play goes back I believe hundreds of years; there was a book some years ago that claimed it went all the way back to ancient Palestine and all sorts of things, which is a bit fanciful. But certainly it’s been played for hundreds of years. I think our version was formalised around the turn of last century, at the start of the 1900s or thereabouts a proper script was written down. It was played year in year out by the children of what became known as Calder High School, and the children of Midgley School. Always the kids from school. But I think perhaps now that we have the “age of health and safety”, insurance and liability, I speculate maybe that’s why the school backpedalled out of being involved and it got left to these lovely guys like Max and Tom and James to carry it on. They were in the last cast at the school and they just carried on doing it because otherwise nobody would have done. It was a real pleasure for me when they invited me in 2018, but it was a bit of a shame because it was because they were a bit short-handed … James Kay put on two shirts and played two parts in the first year I was in it!

S: I have a question for Millie: as the first girl playing the Black Prince, did you have to adapt the role or did you stick to the traditional script?

Millie: When we first started playing with it we were thinking about possibly twisting it so it was the Black Princess! We had a lot of jokes in there about being the Black Princess, lots of jokes about whipping all the men’s asses. We played about with the idea but I think after a while it seemed like the more obvious route was going down the panto route and I would just play a boy. In terms of adapting, the only real adapting I had to do was to wear a binder and pretend to be a boy. I feel like that was probably for the better anyway. I feel like it would have taken away something from the script…it was definitely interesting.

Rob: It’s a thing that we are quite rigid with the script. There are times that you think, oh what if I said this or could I do that, and then you think, well, we could ad lib like fury around the script, but the script’s gotta be the script. There’s nothing taken out and there’s nothing altered. There’s plenty added, but we don’t take anything out or shift it around. The core script remains.

S: Can you tell us a little bit about the story? To outsiders it seems like a lot of people running about with swords and hitting each other. [laughter]

Max: It starts with me as the Fool entering the space, and my job initially is to get the crowd together and begin the show that they’re going to watch. It’s a big spectacle sort of thing. It’s about Saint George and his quest to become the big man in the land. My job is to root for him. But there is a point in the play where he defeats the “Bold Slasher” and that’s a big turning point in my relationship with Saint George. So throughout the play it’s all about Saint George continuously moving on, killing more people, and then towards the end I have my own little spaff with Saint George where we arrange to have a fight. However, luckily, Tosspot steps in and he clears all the tension, all the fighting, and he requests that we “hold up our hands and let our quarrels go”. We then do a song that we all join in with, and then we conclude the play.

The full interview can be seen here: https://vimeo.com/405960063

The YouTube channel for the Players: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYDybED0oaMqOjTb41bqa6w – you can watch last year’s performance here as well. Make sure to bookmark their page and put Good Friday in your diaries because this play is not just entertaining, but a unique part of Calderdale’s theatrical history.