“Alas, alack, and woe is me.
I am in chains; I am not free.
The bad King John did this to me.
And yet my name is Liberty!”
In 2014, Thorpe Players was approached to provide a 15 minute theatre piece for the Magna Carta 800 celebrations. It was to be performed outdoors to a crowd at the lighting of the beacon on St. Ann’s Hill in June 2015. There would be musicians and dancers as well, but no seating, so we would need to capture and hold the attention of our audience.
What to do? When in doubt I always think “What would Frank Muir, our founder, do?” He was a whiz at 15-minute comedy sketches, so there was my starting point. The story of the sealing of Magna Carta, but as a melodrama. Bad King John as the villain, the Barons as the chorus, Liberty as our heroine to be rescued, but we need a hero; let’s enlist St. George! OK, so some of those are fictional, but I did my research, and the facts were right, with added jokes. It started with the verse above. (Liberty always spoke in verse, didn’t you know?)
We took the show to various places over that summer: Thorpe Village Fair (two performances), an arts showcase in Chertsey, and to support a Chertsey Museum Friends talk by Richard Williams. The most exciting one, though, was the one it was written for: the lighting of the beacon. We gathered at The Golden Grove and watched the Morris Dancers.
Then, as it grew dusk, we made our way on foot up the hill to the beacon site. We were a large crowd – the Players all in our mediaeval costumes – and we followed the beat of the Morris Dancers’ drum.
In the dark, in the woods, that beat linked us to a world much older than 1215. Back to a time in pre-history when Nature was much more important than Man. Then we arrived, to be greeted by lights and music and the smell of frying bacon (thank you Scouts!). We performed our melodrama to an unseen throng of perhaps 400, with the distant lights of Heathrow as our backdrop, and told a tale of the fight for freedom. Then the beacon lit and the sky filled with fireworks.
VALERIE LANE, CHAIRMAN
THORPE PLAYERS
www.thorpeplayers.co.uk
for more information or to get involved email: info@thorpeplayers.co.uk