Nadja Leonhard-Hooper: The Collision; Amanda Keating: The Martyrdom (2022)

Everything Old Is New Again—Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim on the Off-Broadway Stage:
A Review of Two Headed Rep’s Production of Nadja Leonhard-Hooper’s The Collision and Amanda Keating’s The Martyrdom at New York’s 59E59 Theaters.

Kevin J. Harty

La Salle University

harty@lasalle.edu

 

1501 Woodcut by Albrecht Dürer of Hrotsvitha

presenting a copy of her Gesta Oddonis to Emperor

Otto the Great as the Abbess Gerberga looks on.

 

The tenth-century German canoness, Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim, can lay claim to many firsts. Among other distinctions, she is the first Germanic woman writer. She is the first woman historian. She is the first writer since antiquity to compose dramas in Latin. She is the first woman Germanic poet. She is the first Western writer to comment on Islam.  But, despite these many accomplishments, we know little of the particulars of her life, other than that she was a canoness at the Benedictine Abbey in Gandersheim in the tenth century, that she was a pupil of the Abbess Gerberga, that she was well-informed about the politics of the Ottonian courts, and that her works—the so-called Liber Primus, Liber Secundus, and Liber Tertius—were either ignored or lost for half a millennium until they were published in an 1501 edition with woodcuts by Dürer. The Liber Primus (The Book of Legends) contains eight hagiographical legends. The Liber Secundus (The Book of Drama) contains six feminist Christian dramatic responses to the Roman comedies of Terence. The Liber Tertius contains two historical works. The first charts the rise of the Ottonian dynasty, while the second records the history of Gandersheim Abbey. Nadja Leonhard-Hooper’s The Collison imagines what the life of a cloistered medieval woman might have been like, and Amanda Keating’s The Martyrdom presents a new adaptation of what is generally considered Hrotsvitha’s funniest and most successful “comedy,” Dulcitius (the Passio Sanctarum Virginum Agapus Chioniae et Hirenae), about the martyrdom of three Christian virgins during the reign of the Emperor Diocletian.   

The Collison, and What Came After, or, Gunch is set in a tenth-century abbey in Grebenstein.  The abbey is poor, understaffed, and overshadowed by the nearby abbey of Gandersheim. There is, at least initially, an abbess, two nuns (Sister Anise and Sister Gudrun), and a troubled and troubling novice named Gunch (“How do you solve a problem like Gunch?”). The abbess seems a stern disciplinarian—a by-the-book kind of nun. Anise and Gudrun struggle to do their best. Gunch seems hopeless. She can neither read nor write, prizes her pet chicken, and seems more concerned with earthly pleasures than heavenly ones.  The abbey is also more than a bit of an also-ran.  Illuminated manuscript editions of the Bible fly out the doors of the abbey in Gandersheim—72 complete Bibles in three years.  Grebenstein’s record is only 69 such manuscripts.  Not helping matters is the fact that the plague has killed off a dozen nuns at Grebenstein, so the abbey is in danger of dissolution.

Gunch soon becomes central to the plot when a meteor falls from the sky and lands right on top of the abbess, whose remains—feet only displayed from under the edge of the meteor—suggest the fate of the Wicked Witch of the East after Dorothy’s house lands on her in The Wizard of Oz.  A second much smaller meteor than falls, lodging a triangular shard of rock into Gunch’s head.  After lingering for several days, Gunch dies, only to be almost immediately resurrected in what holds the potential for being a first-class miracle.  Resurrected Gunch is a nun on speed.  Suddenly she can read and write—and is ambidextrous. Using both hands, she copies and illuminates three complete Bible manuscripts in two days—“two pages per minute.”  So industrious does she become that the abbey runs out of vellum.  But further complicating matters is the fact that Gunch’s manuscripts deviate from the accepted Biblical narrative.  That she has the animals naming Adam—not vice versa—in a move reminiscent of Ursula Le Gunn’s 1985 short story, “She Unnames Them,” may be the least heretical, blasphemous, and plainly obscene textual emendation that she introduces into the copies of the Bible that she dashes off armed with a quill in each hand.

From the start, the play relies on farce and slapstick to propel its plot.  The resurrected Gunch only raises the comedic level.  The abbey has become a source of scandal to the villagers in Gandersheim, so the Bishop of Worms is headed to the abbey for a visitation meant to sort things out and to punish any offenders.

 

Emma Ramos (Sister Gudrun), Layla Khoshnoudi (Sister Gunch), Lizzie Fox (Sister Anise) 

in The Collision. Photo: Ashley Garrett

 

And the male presumption is that every woman is guilty of whatever crimes and sins she may be accused. The bishop is the stock misogynistic authority figure who is found in Hrotsvitha’s plays, and the fate that awaits the three nuns is not unakin to that faced by the three Christian virgins in Hrotsvitha’s Dulcitius. The three nuns hatch a farcical plot to deceive the bishop and to stave off their deaths, which, of course, fails.  But there is a sort of happy ending when the bishop is killed by a rock that falls on his head (in a lapis or saxum ex machina ending?), and the sisters survive to live another day.

The Collision has some theatrical potential, but it is, for starters, too long. It also seems unsure of its genre. Elements of the farcical bump heads with comments on religion, especially on the role women can play in the life of the Church, and with asides on narrative theory—"a story is a snake, and we are mice inside it still alive.” Leonard-Hooper may want to mimic a Hrotsvitha play by mixing comedy with reflections on serious religious issues, but her play consistently fails to do so with any success. The idea of three nuns trapped in a medieval abbey when a giant meteor falls and flattens the abbess offers ample material for a short comedy skit, or a longer Gothic tale of horror. Leonard-Hooper unfortunately hasn’t written either such a skit or such a tale.

Amanda Keating’s The Martyrdom is a more successful homage to Hrotsvitha.  The play’s full title outdoes that of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade in length: The Martyrdom of the Holy Virgins Agape, Chionia, and Irena, by Hrotsvitha, the Nun of Gandersheim, as Told throughout the Last Millenium by the Men, Women, Scholars, Monastics, Puppets, and Theater Companies (Like This One) Who Loved Her, or: Dulcitius. Hrotsvitha’s play is the story of three virgins whom the Emperor Diocletian wishes to marry off to his loyal retainers, provided the three women renounce Christianity.  The women refuse, and they are soon imprisoned in a kitchen by Governor Dulcitius who intends to rape them.  Under the cover of night, Dulcitius sneaks into the kitchen but is struck mad by God, so the governor, in a scene of pure slapstick (tenth-century or otherwise), starts to fondle and embrace the pots and pans in the kitchen.  When he emerges, he is disheveled, covered with soot—in a medieval moment of the use of blackface, which Keating cuts from her adaptation of the play—and totally unrecognizable to his soldiers or to anyone else.  Diocletian then turns to another lieutenant, Sissinus, who, after much difficulty, finally manages to burn the two older virgins at the stake and to have the youngest killed with an arrow shot through her neck. Dulcitius is a comedy in both the traditional and in the medieval sense.  Villains are comically portrayed, easily flustered, and totally inept. There is, as I noted, an element of pure farce and slapstick in the kitchen scene.  And most importantly for medieval audiences, there is the ultimate happy ending.  The three virgins eagerly embrace their martyrdom because it immediately promises an everlasting heavenly reward.

In adapting Dulcitius, from a new translation of the original Latin text by Lizzie Fox, Keating breaks the play up into discreet scenes, each presenting parts of Hrotsvitha’s script from productions staged in different time periods from the medieval to today.  The play then becomes a sort of multi-media college lecture on Hrotsvitha and the historical reception of her play. Further emphasizing the narrative and didactic components of the adaptation, each of the scenes in Keating’s play is followed, as the fourth wall disappears, by a direct address to the audience filling them in on the history of stage productions of Hrotsvitha’s play.

The play opens with Hrotsvitha herself stage center preparing to submit the script of her play to the Reading Committee of the Men’s Monastery of St. Emmeram in Regensburg.  (The most complete text of the works of Hrotsvitha is the Emmeram-Munich Codex, which dates from when Hrotsvitha was still alive or from shortly after her death.)  Happily, the monks find nothing troubling or heretical about the script, and they give it their imprimatur and nihil obstat. In the next scene, we are in fifteenth-century Buda under siege by Ottomans.  A group of nuns decides to put on Dulcitius to inspire the citizens of Buda to resist the invaders.  To do so, they change the names of the villains in the original play to those of various Ottomans leading the attack on Buda. Keating’s adaptation of her source takes a position in one of the continuing debates about Hrotsvitha’s plays: were they written to be performed, or were they closet dramas? From Keating’s point of view, Hrotsvitha’s plays were indeed performed in the tenth century and have continued to be so, even today. To speak directly to their audience, the Hungarian nuns translate the play from Latin and adapt the script further to reflect the real concerns of that audience, who potentially face mass martyrdom should the Ottomans succeed in capturing Buda.

The next scene in The Martyrdom takes us to a French production of Dulcitius in 1880s’ Paris which used marionettes to stage the play.  The production was inspired by Anatole France, who had previously written a novel that adapted one of Hrotsvitha’s plays. More importantly, the production addressed the late-nineteenth debate between French and German scholars about whether the play was ever staged, or even stageable. The Germans thought not, with one scholar going so far as to suggest that, because she was a woman, Hrotsvitha could not have even written the play and or any of the other works attributed to her. The French answer was obviously the opposite, and this production using puppets suggested that attempts to attack Hrotsvitha in general, or her work in particular, were simply very poorly disguised examples of nineteenth-century European misogyny.

A rebuttal to misogyny also informs the next scene in Keating’s play which is taken from a 1914 production of the play in London by the Pioneer Players.  The group was founded by Edith Craig, the daughter of the famous stage actor Ellen Terry, who was a member of the production’s cast. The production’s script was based on the first translation of Hrotsvitha’s work into English published under the pen name Chris(topher) St. John by Craig’s lover, Christabel Marshall. This production had all the markings of a suffragist call to action, Craig and company being outspoken advocates for the rights of women to determine their own destinies and to vote. The women in Hrotsvitha’s play may have died for their faith, but their spirits live on to inspire women in the early twentieth century in their struggles for equality.

A feminist agenda also underlies a 1960 production of the play at the University of Michigan under the direction of Sister Mary Marguerite Butler, then a graduate student in theater. Butler’s doctoral dissertation, subsequently revised and published as a monograph, attempted to ensure that Hrotsvitha would finally receive her rightful place in the canon, while also offering Hrotsvitha’s life and work as a role model for college-age women at the time.  Keating’s adaptation then concludes with her own production itself in a moment of pure metadrama.  The actors bring the play to its finale by reciting a litany of praises for Hrotsvitha and her plays from across more than a millennium.

As I indicated earlier, The Two Headed Rep’s production of The Martyrdom has all the hallmarks of a multi-media college lecture on Hrotsvitha and her groundbreaking career as a woman dramatist and writer.  As such, it is a timely and useful reminder of how literary history has consistently silenced the important voices of people whom the canon has marginalized.  Hrotsvitha’s name means “strong voice.”  Too often the strong voices of women like Hrotsvitha have been relegated to footnotes or to incidental mentions.  As we continue (belatedly) to open up and reconstruct the literary canon, Hrotsvitha’s is a strong voice that needs to be heard and that tells us a great deal about the less than quiet lives of desperation which at least some medieval women led.

    

The Collison by Nadja Leonard Hooper and The Martyrdom adapted by Amanda Keating from a translation of Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim’s tenth-century play, Dulcinius, by Lizzie Fox. Directed by Molly Clifford. With Lizzie Fox, Halima Henderson, Layla Khoshnoudi, and Emma Ramos. Presented by Two Headed Rep, 16 January-5 February 2022, at New York City’s 59E59 Theaters.

Arthur & Merlin: Knights of Camelot, dir. Giles Alderson

Arthur & Merlin: Knights of Camelot, dir. Giles Alderson (2020) 

 

Reviewed by:

Christopher Berard, Providence College

cberard2@providence.edu

3.5/4 STARS

 

Arthur’s Return Home: Giles Alderson’s Arthur & Merlin: Knights of Camelot

 

Arthur & Merlin: Knights of Camelot is a beautifully made and intelligently written low-budget adaptation of a core Arthurian tale: Arthur’s journey home from the Roman War to reclaim Britain from his usurping kinsman Mordred. Director Giles Alderson and cinematographer Andrew Rodger shot the film entirely on location in Wales at Caerphilly Castle, Dunraven Bay, and Ogmore-by-Sea. The breathtaking Welsh landscape and natural lighting lend an air of Arthurian authenticity to the production. Equally brilliant is the plot, une belle conjointure of narrative details and themes from medieval Arthurian literature and plot devices and tropes from such action-adventure films as Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), Thor (2011), Skyfall (2012), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017).

 

The film opens with a flashback sequence: young brothers-in-arms King Arthur (Richard Short) and Sir Lancelot (Tim Fellingham) race their horses along the coast. Traveling into a forest, the pair hear the siren song of a lady in a cave. Entranced, Arthur approaches the maiden, who then transforms into an old hag and bites Arthur on the neck. Lancelot comes to Arthur’s rescue and dispatches the vampiric witch. Arthur and Lancelot then hear a cry for help within the cave and discover the witch’s prisoner, Guinevere (Stella Stocker), whose appearance the witch had simulated. Here, writers Giles Alderson, Simon Cotton, and Jonny Grant rework the False Guinevere motif found in the Old French Prose Lancelot (c. 1210) and Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (1470).

 

After this opening, which would have been more effective as a pre-title sequence, Merlin (Richard Brake) introduces the narrative proper, explaining to the audience that Arthur married Guinevere and later left her in the care of his son from a previous relationship, Mordred (Joel Phillimore). Arthur, Merlin explains, has just spent the better part of eight years fighting the Romans. Within the existing Arthurian tradition, Thomas Hughes’ Senecan tragedy The Misfortunes of Arthur (1587) offers a precedent for this narrative starting point. In Hughes’ play, Arthur’s Roman War parallels the Trojan War in duration, and Arthur, as a war-wearied hero returning to a troubled home, finds himself in a situation analogous to the Greek heroes Odysseus and Agamemnon.

 

Arthur, Merlin explains, is haunted by the memories of the gruesome Roman War. He appears to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. In France, the king drinks to excess to dull his pain and engages in bare-knuckle boxing to prove his martial prowess. Arthur’s display of brute masculinity evokes Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur and calls to mind Daniel Craig’s damaged and conflicted portrayal of James Bond at the start of Skyfall.

 

Learning of a Saxon threat to Britain, Arthur wants to remain in France and let Mordred attend to Britain’s defense. Wallowing in self-pity, he calls himself an “old drunk” and laments the loss of his sword Excalibur. In a verbal exchange with Lancelot, Arthur declares: “There is no king without Excalibur”. Lancelot responds: “It is not the sword that made you either. It has abandoned you because you have abandoned yourself.” Just as Thor loses Mjölnir in Thor (2011) until he proves himself worthy to wield it again, so too does Arthur lose Excalibur. Here we are reminded that the good king must first rule himself before ruling over others. Why Arthur lost Excalibur in the first place remains unclear. Was it on account of his deeds of war or his difficulty coping with the trauma of war? If the latter, our modern sensibilities are more forgiving than those of the Lady of the Lake.

 

The setting shifts from a disreputable inn in France to the royal court at Camelot. Mordred is seeking to take possession of not only Arthur’s kingdom but also his queen. Guinevere rebukes Mordred, remarking, “I am neither your lady nor your creature”. Shortly thereafter, Mordred attempts to persuade the remnant of Arthur’s faithful vassals to swear allegiance to him and to let him pursue a policy of appeasement with the Saxons. A debate ensues between Mordred and Arthur’s loyal men regarding the merits of the absent king’s rulership. Arthur’s supporters proudly declare: “Arthur has no throne. Our king takes his seat at the table equal to all his knights.” Mordred reminds them that he compelled his woodsman on pain of death to destroy the Round Table. Through this exchange, we learn that Arthur is a good feudal monarch who rules as primus inter pares with the advice and consent of his vassals.

 

The next matter of debate concerns the justness of Arthur’s Roman War. His supporters claim that Arthur fights for honor and for Camelot. Mordred defames Arthur as a “warmongering opportunist” who fights for his own private good to the detriment of the public good of Britain. This dialogue encapsulates the just war debate at the heart of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (1137), the Alliterative Morte Arthure (c. 1400), and Hughes’ Misfortunes of Arthur. Mordred does not wait for a consensus opinion or the consent of the governed; instead, he crushes dissent by force of arms, stabbing one of Arthur’s faithful supporters.

 

In an ironic parallel, it is not the counsel of Arthur’s knights that moves him to return home to Camelot, but rather a failed attempt on his life that spurs him into action. Mordred’s assassins succeed in killing one of Arthur’s knights and, as is the case in the Alliterative Morte Arthure, feelings of guilt and responsibility for the loss of his men compel Arthur to act. His return home calls to mind the opening of Kevin Reynolds’ Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Whereas Robin of Locksley returns from the Third Crusade to find his ancestral castle in ruins, Arthur returns from the Roman War to find his entire kingdom in shambles.

 

After some cutting back and forth from palace intrigue to the hero’s progress, Arthur receives counsel from Merlin. The sage tells Arthur that he is distracted from his cause and that his heavy drinking is not helping the situation. Arthur, filled with angst, asks: “What is my cause? I fought a war and I cannot remember why. I sent ten thousand men to their death, and the reason has been lost.” Merlin responds: “What better reason than home?” Arthur, ridden with guilt, answers: “a home that I have not protected…Excalibur was my destiny, and even that has abandoned me.” Merlin consoles Arthur by stating that Excalibur will return to him when he is ready for it. Arthur then expresses fear that the day will never come. Merlin essentially tells Arthur: “fake it till you make it,” or to quote an even more popular and patriotic English aphorism: “keep calm and carry on.” This episode calls to mind Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Rises (2012), when an injured and aging Bruce Wayne must overcome self-doubt, escape from an underground prison, and save Gotham from Bane’s nefarious plans.

 

After Merlin encourages Arthur, it is Arthur’s turn to inspire his faithful followers with a rousing speech. Just as Merlin found it necessary to remind Arthur of his identity and purpose, so too does Arthur remind his knights of their greatness as the chosen knights of the Round Table and also their duty to defend Camelot and one another. Curiously there is no explicit mention of God in this monologue. Arthur’s Circle of Avalon speech is a far cry from Hal’s St. Crispin’s Day speech in Shakespeare’s Henry V, and this was one of the few stodgy moments in the film.

 

After another surprise attack that again results in the death of one of Arthur’s knights, the king sends Lancelot west for reinforcements and orders the rest of his men to make their way to Camelot without him. Arthur knows that a skilled female assassin is tracking his movements, and he wants to prevent her from harming his beloved companions. As seen in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), the division of Arthur’s men allows individual quests and shifts in narrative focus.

 

Meanwhile, Mordred learns that Guinevere and Lancelot are lovers. He sends his sorceress Vortigone (Jennifer Matter) to impersonate Guinevere and thereby capture Lancelot—a recurrence of the False Guinevere motif. Mordred’s plan works. Elsewhere, Arthur must confront his own demons in the form of the female assassin. She blames Arthur for not protecting her family from Mordred’s cruelty and injustice. Arthur reluctantly kills her in self-defense and then lapses back into despair. Merlin returns to Arthur in his moment of need and gives him another instruction on good kingship: “A king,” he says, “endures so that he can protect his people and his country. Most of all, he endures so that he can empower those who cannot dream of sitting at the Round Table.” Heartened, Arthur continues on his journey and encounters the Lady of the Lake. He undergoes a process of purification through immersion in water and then receives Excalibur.

 

At last, everything comes to a head at Camelot. Lancelot is imprisoned and awaiting execution in the castle and Mordred is about to wed Guinevere in a grand ceremony against her wishes. Arthur and his knights secretly enter the castle through a storm drain and launch a surprise attack. This combined castle invasion and wedding crash calls to mind Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves: Arthur is Robin Hood; Guinevere is Maid Marian; Mordred is the Sheriff of Nottingham; and Vortigone is Mortianna, the evil witch. Such a home invasion is certainly a familiar and convenient plot device, but it does have precedent in British history, namely the Nottingham Castle coup of 1330 that enabled Edward III to end the regency government of Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer.

 

Although the attack on Camelot is a familiar action-adventure plot device, the denouement of the film is not the customary Twilight of the Gods that we have come expect from Arthurian films. Arthur and Mordred do not deliver fatal blows to one another. Instead, Guinevere rescues herself by killing the sorceress Vortigone. Guinevere and Lancelot ride off into the sunset. Arthur, despite the heartache of losing his queen and his best friend, retakes his castle, his kingdom, and his crown. Arthur disowns Mordred but permits him to run away from Camelot in disgrace. The love triangle between Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot remains unresolved as does the looming Saxon threat. The closing frame of the film features King Arthur wearing his crown and sitting on his throne, an iconic image evocative of the end credits of John Milius’ Conan the Barbarian (1982).

 

Arthur & Merlin: Knights of Camelot has an uninspired title, and parts of the script, especially the Circle of Avalon speech, are lackluster. The clever plot, beautiful cinematography, and earnest performances from the cast more than compensate for these relatively minor quibbles. A better title for the film, in this reviewer’s opinion, would be “Arthur’s Return Home,” which encapsulates the plot of the film and subtly references Jack’s Return Home (1970), the novel by British writer Ted Lewis that was adapted into the 1971 British cult classic Get Carter—yet another film involving a man of blood who returns home to restore order and exact retribution. The presence of such timeless and substantive Arthurian themes as self-mastery, just warfare, and good rulership in a screenplay that honors both the medieval Arthurian literary tradition and the modern action-adventure genre makes this film a worthy British addition to the ever-growing catalogue of Cinema Arthuriana.

 

Christopher Berard

 

Arthur & Merlin: Knights of Camelot, Giles Alderson: director / writer; Simon Cotton: writer, Jonny Grant: writer, photography by Andrew Rodger, design by Jamie Foot, costumes by Robyn Manton, music by Nick Samuel. Signature Entertainment, 2020. 130 minutes.

Merry Medievally Speaking, December 2021

Merry Medievally Speaking 2021 to all our readers! For this message, I thought I’d share with you an example of seasonal medievalism I gleaned from Jan Ziolkowski’s magisterial reception history of the medieval Juggler of Notre Dame, here from volume 6, War and Peace, Sex and Violence (2018). It shows the expected links of medievalism to (medieval) Christianity, but much more:

 

Otto Blechman retold/redrew the juggler narrative in 1953 (The Juggler of Our Lady). Freshly graduated from Oberlin, the young artist was offered to design a “graphic novel” on a Noel theme. He was Jewish and apparently knew little about the Christian holiday. However, as part of the ubiquitous nature of postmedieval medievalia, he and some of his friends were familiar with the story of the juggler, which seemed to have enough of a connection to fulfill the publisher’s mandate for a book that would sell as a seasonal gift. Although the young artist could very well have secularized the story into a parable of his own life (the juggler performing to a world full of indifference for his art and dedication), he decided not to obliterate the religious theme involved. Armed with the outlines of medieval culture in Will Durant’s influential cultural history, specifically the volume on The Age of Faith, he resolved to situate the juggler’s story in a medieval monastery, but managed to ecumenize it so that it became attractive and acceptable to a larger audience: it could speak to those with a nostalgia for such a simpler “age of faith” as much as to those only deploring the general lack of spirituality in the twentieth century. Blechman’s imaginative and unassuming transmutation was adapted into a nine-minute animated version in 1957, with a voiceover by none other than Boris Karloff. Here is this brilliant heart-warming adaptation, provided by YouTube. Enjoy!