YORK is the city that knows its waggon wheels from its Wagon Wheels, for so many years sent spinning towards theatregoers by pantomime dame Berwick Kaler.
Once every four summers, the York Festival Trust, the city Guilds and assorted theatre companies and community groups take to the city streets to revive the medieval texts of the York Mystery Plays, mingling with the Sunday shoppers and the aromas emerging from cafes, restaurants, stalls and storied chocolate store over two weekends.
Ten of the 48 plays – the most complete set in the world – and a further extract are being staged at four stations, the wagons kept on the move from mid-morning at the Minster Refectory Gardens to King’s Square, St Sampson’s Square and the one seated, ticketed location, Dean’s Park, in the shadow of York Minster.
Being the city of festivals and home to the Jorvik Viking Centre, let alone stag and hen parties, York and dressing up go hand and hand, never more so than for the York Mystery Plays, where the sight of Angel 1 and 2 walking through Goodramgate, wings at full span, faces shielded by veils, separated from their fellow Doomsday performers, looked perfectly normal for a York Sunday rather than an act of divine intervention.
It is easy to take such occurrences for granted in York, but it is all part of living with history and history being alive in a city whose present and future continues to be shaped by its past.
The Mystery Plays are steeped in tradition: plays being “brought forth” on waggons – always with a double ‘GG’ – pulled by human toil rather than horses, led by drums and banners and the dignitaries of assorted guilds in full regalia.
Each set must fit on the waggon, calling for inventive, compact design, easy to assemble and take down. Some are humorous, such as Pip Cook and the Guild of Cordwainers’ The Shepherds, with its multitude of sheep; none is more impactful than the cross rising to the sky, bearing the pierced frame of Thom Feeney’s Jesus of Nazareth, pulled and pushed into position by the four jesting Workmen of York Settlement Community Players, performing a Pageant Waggon play for the first time in 12 years for the York Butchers’ Gild.
Faces familiar from the York theatre scene or from past productions share the spotlight with performers new to the declamatory demands of street theatre in a production that always reflects the changing community of York.
Bodhan Pitel’s Herod in DSpace Ukrainian Theatre and the Guild of Scriveners’ The Massacre Of The Innocents. Picture: John Saunders
Step forward DSpace Ukrainian Theatre, the company set up in York by artistic director and actress Daryna Klymenko, presenting The Massacre Of The Innocents, a title that could not have more resonance.
Writing in the York Mystery Plays Festival 2026 programme, Klymenko says: “Working on the tragic story of the Massacre of the Innocents, we could not ignore the parallels with the modern world – with the way dictatorship , violence and an unhealthy hunger for power and wealth become irreversibly destructive.
“Through this performance, we aim not only to tell a tragic story, but also to ask the question: why do similar tragedies continue to happen? And what has the power to resist them?”
DSpace specialise in physical expression, body language and hidden parallels, and their performance, led by Bodhan Pitel’s violent, gaudy Herod, is the essence of why these Plays continue to chime with the times.
Through the day’s perambulations, we encounter all manner of angels (Guiding/Herald/Fallen/Death/Hey-Hey Angel et al); seven iterations of God (including Daniel Wilmot’s Deus for the Guild of Building’s The Creation) and Jesus times three (the stripped Oscar Langford and Thom Feeney and a white-robed/Elvis-in-Vegas Wren Crawford).
Then add Adam & Eve, Satan, Satanas and Devils, Noah and Mrs Mrs Noah, a Forsaken Soul, shepherds, Mary, Mary Magdalene, Naughty Child 1 and 2, Saved Souls and Damned Souls, messengers, councillors and all manner of animals. All life – and one central death– is here and here to stay, you sense.
Pageant Master Dr Alan Heaven has overseen a festival with two Sunday performances, midweek Sunset plays in Shambles Market, walks and talks, pop-up shop and exhibitions, pipers’ performances and a Festival Fringe: a proper festival that celebrates York, street plays and the alliterative Yorkshire dialect, all while embracing history and Mystery with gusto.
The York Mystery Plays 2026, next performance, July 5. More details at yorkmysteryplays.co.uk.