In Comes the Calverton Plough Play
Before Christmas I was invited back to the Theatre Royal Nottingham to present a talk about The House That Jack Built, the very first Pantomime at the Theatre Royal in 1865.
My talk preceded a rehearsed reading by the Nottingham Rebels, the venue’s community theatre group, of my adaptation of the original 1865 script.
This project was something I had been nursing for several years having discovered that the original script, contained within the Book of Words, the Victorian equivalent to our modern theatre programme, was in Nottingham City Council’s archives.
I was originally going to direct this rehearsed reading in December 2020, but with the pandemic, all theatres were closed, and the Panto clowning season was transferred to Downing Street. It’s worth saying that I used that throwaway line in my talk, and it got cheers and a round of applause. A clear reminder to Boris Johnson et al, that we’ll never forget.
So having left the Theatre Royal in January 2023, it was good to discover some months later that this project I conceived was still going to go ahead and delightful to revisit the script again in preparing my talk.
This 1865 production represents a time before music hall really began to exert its influence on Panto, when the form was still recognising its true commedia dell’arte origins, and my presentation reflected this and other themes, including how The House That Jack Built is now a lost title in the Pantomime canon, which I’ve previously written about here.
But my central point was the unique Nottingham focus of this Pantomime, rather than the more generic star-driven show seen nowadays. This local emphasis was expressed in the first stage directions:
“Enter Jack, a plough boy.”
Many in that original audience would have made the immediate association with Jack with the Plough Play, an East Midlands/Nottinghamshire tradition of farmworkers visiting houses and pubs and staging their own simple performance with doggerel, songs, slapstick, and cross-dressing. (1) The link with Pantomime is obvious and here in the Theatre Royal’s grand new Panto, a local plough boy is its central character.
This Mummer’s Play was usually performed on the first Monday after Twelfth Night and has been described as “a grand celebration of licensed misrule,” with characters mocking both normality and authority. (2)
The tradition is still upheld every year when the Calverton Plough Play is performed every January in local villages, including my own at The Woodlark Inn in Lambley. Using a script from 1890, the Calverton Real Ale and Plough Play Preservation Society have been dispensing whiff-whaff since 1979.
I have gone on record before in saying the Plough Play is one of the best pieces of theatre I have seen, due to its authenticity, the pub setting, the traditional music, its heritage, the abandonment of the performers and the sheer nonsense of the script. I say script, but as the company say themselves on their website … “In theory, these are the words we should be speaking. In practice … actually, best not go there.”
The Plough Play also provides some fun during one of the gloomiest times in the calendar. As Thomas Millar in The Illustrated London Almanack for 1849 commented:
“January, with its short days and long nights, though it still comes as of old, with frost, and snow, and cold, and darkness, brings with it once a year, its merry Plough Monday, and in a few out-of-the-way country places the village street is all astir with the little crowd of gaping rustics, just as it was, except for the changes in costume and architecture, three or four centuries ago … Heralding the way, come the healthy looking, round, chubby-faced lads, waving their hats and caps, regardless of the cold.” (3)
Image of Plough Monday from The Illustrated London Almanack for 1849.
It had been a few years since I had last seen it and so having done the recent research, linking Panto to Mummer’s Plays, I felt duty bound to visit my local and experience The Plough Play once again for its 2024 incarnation. Along with my fellow gaping rustics, of course.
I wasn’t disappointed. The bar at The Woodlark is snug and into this space enter the musicians, followed by Bold Tom:
“In comes I, bold Tom,
A brisk and lively young fellow.
I have come to taste of your best beef and ale,
They tell me is so ripe and so mellow.
Good evening, ladies, and gentlemen all,
It's Plough Monday tonight, that makes Tom so bold as to call”. (4)
The Recruiting Sergeant enters. Calverton Plough Play at The Woodlark, Lambley, 2024.
A motley of collection of characters follow, including a Recruiting Sergeant, Eezum Squeezum (“On my back I carry my besom” … the type of language and rhyming on display throughout The House That Jack Built), Dame Jane (I don’t really have to point out the Panto connection here, do I?), Beelzebub himself and finally The Doctor, whose opening lines are recited by all:
“I can cure ... the hipsy, the pipsy,
The palsy and the gout.
The pains within
And the pains without. (5)
Each character arrives with a firm knock at the door, the familiar ‘In Comes I …” and a cheer from the awaiting audience. A scene played out for the past 150 plus years.
The “plot” is daft and glorious, with performances perhaps aided by lubrication received in the various hostelries they visit of an evening.
After each turn, a character will then sit amongst us or at the bar, taunting their various performers. You think why can’t every theatre performance I see be like this. It would vastly improve many.
The show finishes and a collection is made for Nottinghamshire NSPCC. No one is in any rush to leave and so more beer is supped, before they eventually depart. A thoroughly enjoyable night of misrule.
At the beginning of the year, The Observer described the planned 100% cuts by local authorities, the biggest public arts funders in the UK, as “a national emergency”. On top of existing cuts, COVID, a revolving door of culture secretaries, a cost of living crisis and a growing list of bankrupt councils, the arts has never been in such a difficult state.
Added to this there is an ongoing debate within the industry about ticket pricing and how going to the theatre is becoming a pastime of the privileged few, particularly in the West End. In 2023, David Tennant accurately spoke about how theatre seats are now beyond the reach of younger audiences summarising:
“Live theatre is expensive and it’s increasingly expensive to run and therefore the ticket prices are increasingly expensive, and that’s a difficult thing to rationalise.” (6)
Some theatres are doing their bit, such as Pay What You Can at Nottingham Playhouse, but maybe the Plough Play offers a solution of sorts. In other words, let’s rediscover our artistic heritage with more rough-hewn performances in pubs, on the streets, in parks, wherever people gather. Let’s eschew the complicated lights and set machinery for a while and return to more simple, connected, and sustainable performances, rather than accepting yet another West End musical based on an eighties film, that we can’t afford to see.
With theatres closed, this was the ethos of much of the work created during COVID. Look at how City Arts Nottingham literally took their children’s show The Search for Teddy Island to people’s doorsteps.
I spent over twenty years working in a large-scale touring venue and saw some of the most incredible pieces of theatre, but if I’m honest a live performance is often more distinctive and joyful when it’s up close and local, in a non-theatrical setting.
Whilst trying hard not to sound like Nicholas Craig, theatre is special. The experience of a live performance can be life-changing, and what is currently happening to the arts in the UK is a national tragedy. Our support is guaranteed, but maybe it’s also a time to re-calibrate about where theatre should actually connect.
“Good master and good mistress
As you sit by your fire,
Remember us poor Plough Boys
Who plough through mud and mire.
We thank you for civility
And what you’ve given us here.
We wish you all a very good night,
And a Happy New Year” (7)
(1) A quick summary of the history of the Plough Play can be found here on the website for the English Folk Dance and Song Society
(2) Hutton, R. (1996) The Stations of the Sun. Oxford University Press
(3) Miller, T. (1849) The Illustrated London Almanack for 1849. Available at The Illustrated London almanack : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
(4) Extract from the Calverton Plough Play (as at 2019) Main Source: Cropwell Ploughboys Play, 1890. the-calverton-plough-play-2019-v1.0-1.pdf (wordpress.com)
(5) Ibid.
(6) Price of West End theatre tickets can be ludicrous, says David Tennant | Theatre | The Guardian
(7) Extract from the Calverton Plough Play (as at 2019) Main Source: Cropwell Ploughboys Play, 1890. the-calverton-plough-play-2019-v1.0-1.pdf (wordpress.com)
