Many towns and cities in Europe also put on plays for Corpus Christi Day, but they didn’t evolve in the peripatetic-wagon direction that northern England did. Instead, they created temporary, then increasingly permanent, theaters in large public squares. As the theaters became more permanent, they staged many more performances at other parts of the year, leaning especially on saints’ stories. And the stages grew ever more elaborate.
The basic design began as one stage area with multiple “places” (lieux) represented around the back: Heaven, Hell, Jerusalem, Bethlehem. Typically, characters who were going to be in stories in each location stood in their “place,” waiting for the action to involve them. They could then speak their lines from the place, or they could walk forward to the central stage. The whole stage was higher level than the ground, with more expensive viewing boxes at the same level.
When there was one stage with a non-moving structure, the plays could use many more technical tricks to create “realism.” Most productions dealt with Biblical or saints’ stories, and most of these had supernatural elements. What would it look like if they could manage to make someone disappear, change color, or walk on water? How astonished would audiences be if they could lift a building, create lightning, or make a demon emerge from a person’s body? Producers of spectacles have always wanted the same things that they still want, they just had more limited resources for tromping l’oeil.
In medieval France, the “conducteur des secrets” was what we now call “the special effects guy.” The more permanent his stage, the fancier he could get. For example, stages had underground tunnels, sometimes literally under the ground, not just under the stage. Actors could use them to leave the stage without being seen, for general purposes such as their part being finished or to escape from a “burning building,” or they could enter the stage, rising from the dead.
Above the ground, cranes and tall iron structures allowed the conducteurs des secrets to set up systems of pulleys, winches, and counterweights. Just as they do today, they might have an actor wearing a harness so that they could attach a rope and fly him to the heavens. In one dramatic case, Jesus and the Devil both suddenly shot to the pinnacle of the Temple because the Devil wore a harness, attached to a rope and pulley, with a counterweight ready to be dropped. Cranes also let things down, such as clouds. A cloud made of wood or fabric could block the audience’s view for a critical costume change or to obscure the trapdoor that let the vanishing actor down into a tunnel.
Stationary semi-permanent stages also allowed water tanks, much as Hollywood sound stages have used them in our time. The most extreme water tank was at Bourges, where the whole stage area was made ready to receive water pumped in via underground pipes. But even a large half-stage water tank allowed Peter to walk on water, or the prow of Noah’s ark to see rising water, or Jesus to sit in a real boat while he taught the people on the beach.
What about Noah’s dove? I suggested that our wagon-bound Noah probably sent a model dove out on a wire, but these larger stationary productions often used real doves. The return bird was probably on a wire, so Noah could look up and say “here she comes!” and then pluck the branch from its mouth. Bird training was a well-known art in this time of falconry, so they could use trained owls and ravens, too.
Another area of staging that just cried out for “secrets” to make them look real: all sorts of faked deaths. Fake blood was definitely in use: concealed on the tip of a spear or knife to gush out on contact when Abel or Jesus was struck, however lightly in reality. It wasn’t hard to find spare blood, since butchering animals was a way of life. The butcher could easily give you a bladder full of blood that you could conceal in a fake head, so when the executioner “cut off” a head, the real actor’s head was concealed while the mock head now dripped real blood. This worked for other forms of torture: the real actor didn’t need to bleed or be in pain, as long as copious red stuff flowed.
Saints’ plays were full of gore. While our modern audiences have gotten hard to impress with special effects, their audiences were hard to impress with blood, so they went the extra mile. I’m quoting here from John Wesley Harris’s Medieval Theatre in Context because I can’t improve on these two summaries: “St. Denis, in the long French play devoted to him, was progressively whipped, racked, tormented on a red-hot grill, savaged by wild animals, steeped in a furnace, crucified, beheaded, and disemboweled, with his bowels shown bursting out of his belly. St. Barbara, in another play, was stripped naked, bound to a stake, beaten and burnt, had her breasts cut off, was rolled in a nail-studded barrel and dragged over a mountain by her hair, before being executed.” (145) As Harris says, we’d like to think that a dummy saint was subjected to most of those torments.
Lightning and fire are darlings of special effects and were then, too. Gunpowder came to Europe around 1350, and it was first used more for tricks than for practical weaponry. Elijah probably called down fire from heaven to consume his altar either with a hidden explosive charge that suddenly lit or with a rocket traveling quickly down a wire to hit the target. Ditto for the burning bush and various things that the Devil did. Sound effects for thunder went with the lightning: thin sheets of bronze, or casks filled with stones, could supply some loud noise.
Ordinary uses of fire were always good for a show, too, as is still true. (When I was a child, we saw a long-running outdoor production called “The Shepherd of the Hills,” in Missouri, and I don’t remember anything except that they really did have a big fire.) Medieval French theaters burned down city gates and houses, temples and idols. No wonder the actors sometimes needed a tunnel for safe retreat.