TWO wild strangers will roll into York today for the 2026 York Mystery Plays Fringe, tasked with telling tales destined to turn the city upside down.
Combining ferocious wit and fearless physical storytelling, artistic director Paul Birch’s production of Mistero Buffo for York’s Christian theatre company, Riding Lights, will tear into faith, power, profit and hypocrisy by turning ancient Bible stories into urgent, humorous modern theatre with a clear spiritual heart.
Translated by Ed Emery from Nobel prize-winning Italian playwright Dario Fo’s 1969 Communist take on the Mystery Plays, this subversive and unapologetically seditious comedy will be performed by Yorkshire actors Thomas Frere and Cathy Sara.
Premiered by Fo as a solo piece, Mistero Buffo was last performed by Riding Lights with a cast of four in July 2003 under the direction of late founder and artistic director Paul Burbridge, who had once performed the play in solo mode himself.
Thomas Frere in a scene from Mistero Buffo. Picture Tom Jackson
Now it will be staged as a two-hander. “We’ve taken it that the Jongleur and Villeyn are the two central characters, building our show around that relationship, with the Jongleur – a character who came from commedia dell’arte – being the person who’s empowered to speak out,” says director Paul Birch.
“We’re staging Mistero Buffo 100 years since Dario Fo’s birth, using Emery’s translation but they’ve let us introduce some more topical satire,” says director Paul Birch. “So we’ve gone from Italian car factories to AI and zero hours contracts. The Jongleur character is speaking truth to power now, rather than to the 1960s. It will be very obvious that’s it’s here and now, in this space, though we’re not doing it in the Yorkshire dialect.”
Paul was drawn to Mistero Buffo by Riding Lights’ long association with the York Mystery Plays and dramas where religion overlaps with politics. “For me personally, because it uses Biblical storytelling, and as a company we’re seeing how religion gets into bed with politics, and we’re faced with seeing that in America now, I see it as a distortion of faith. That’s what’s happening with faith and politics now.”
Thomas Frere says: “When you start to read the script, there are phrases that jump out at you, where you think, ‘it could have been written now with its stories of bosses trying to take advantage of people, though it was written in the 1960s’.”
Cathy Sara says: “People are people, and to me it’s the people who are victims when power is applied; how hopeless they feel, though there is always hope – but who’s going to speak up for you and who’s going to speak out?”
Mistero Buffo designer Ollie Brown, left, and director Paul Birch
Thomas rejoins: “It will be interesting to see how these stories go down because we don’t really know at this stage. I honestly don’t know how the audience will react.”
Paul says: “The audience for our touring shows is very different from an audience at Friargate Theatre in our home city. With this show, they may come as beloved Mystery Plays followers, who might be shocked by something in Fo’s play, which shifts how you react. One moment you will laugh; the next moment you may feel differently.”
Cathy rejoins: “That’s what’s unsettling about this play, where you now question what’s true, what’s the truth.”
Paul suggests: “The imagined in Mistero Buffo can be truthful, so it’s slippery, but I hope people find the play empowering and feel inspired to make provocative work that criticises as well as celebrates. I think it’s really exciting for Riding Lights to be part of doing that. It certainly floats my political boat!”
Cathy asserts: “Theatre has the chance to ask questions, but where we don’t have to give all the answers. I think theatre is more honest than that, rougher than that.”
Cathy Sara in a vignette from Riding Lights’ Mistero Buffo. Picture: Tom Jackson
Paul adds: “There’s a lot of direct address in Mistero Buffo, and plenty of audience involvement in the storytelling, so the audiences will become complicit in it and aren’t just witnesses. That’s why this production has a very different feel from when it was last done here – and Ollie Brown’s in-the-round setting will definitely have an impact on that.”
Riding Lights are delighted and excited to be participating in the 2026 York Mystery Plays Fringe. “It’s all part of York being the city of festivals, which has always been a good tourist ploy,” says Thomas. “When they come to the city, there’s always something for them to do – and theatre companies should always reach out to them, as well as playing to local people.”
Paul says: “I feel that ‘festival’ and ‘festivities’ are good words to describe this play, where people can come to the theatre and see this kind of punky play in a city where things can grow in back alleys.
“With this Fringe production, we really want to see if there’s a way for us to make interesting and provocative work like this that’s not reliant on us touring it.” Watch this space.
Riding Lights Theatre Company in Mistero Buffo, Friargate Theatre, York, today, tomorrow, then July 1 to 4, 7.30pm, plus 2.30pm matinees on July 3 and 4. Box office: www.ridinglights.org.
Cathy Sara’s Villeyn, expressing her frustrations as she cleans the floor in Mistero Buffo. Picture: Tom Jackson
REVIEW: Riding Lights Theatre Company in Mistero Buffo, York Mystery Plays 2026 Fringe, Friargate Theatre, York ****
THE York Mystery Plays began as street plays, not the works of the church, but taking Bible stories to the people from dawn until dusk on Corpus Christi Day.
Nobel prize-winning Italian Communist playwright Dario Fo’s Mistero Buffo was written as his 1969 update on that form of storytelling, turning ancient texts into startling modern parables suffused with spiritual zeal, while attacking contemporary social ills too.
In York Christian theatre company Riding Lights’ contribution to this summer’s 2026 York Mystery Plays Fringe, artistic director Paul Birch steered a two-hander production where “two wild strangers rolled into York to tell tales destined to turn the city upside down”.
Thomas Frere’s Jongleur spinning a tale in Mistero Buffo. Picture: Tom Jackson
Friargate Theatre was transformed into a theatre in the round – the first time your reviewer has seen a play there in theatre’s most immersive setting – for two highly experienced hands, Yorkshire actors Thomas Frere and Cathy Sara, to play respectively the Jongleur (an itinerant jester/entertainer in medieval Europe) and the honest, persevering Villeyn (representing the downtrodden, working-class peasant).
We arrived to the sight of Sara’s Villeyn forlornly striving to polish the already shiny floor on cleaning duty, but only adding new marks to the surface.
It was exhausting just watching her, talking under her breath, as she went about her variation on painting the Forth Bridge or Sisyphus pushing his boulder up the hill again and again. Looking on too, from a front row seat, was Frere’s Jongleur in dapper bow tie, hair slicked back, biding his time before playing his travelling satirist’s hand in railing against injustice.
Translated by Ed Emery, Mistero Buffo is a series of visceral vignettes that “takes a satirical swipe at abuses of power and religious abuses”, attacking wickedness and folly, censuring rulers who misuse their powers and turn in to predators.
Cathy Sara’s Mary at the foot of the cross. Picture: Tom Jackson
Between them, Sara and Frere told such vignettes as The Resurrection Of Lazarus, The Wedding At Cana and The Birth Of The Jongleur on Ollie Brown’s set, designed “on a shoestring”, where the cross for Christ’s crucifixion took the form of a set of stepladders.
Jesus’s mother, Mary, speaks in only four passages in the Bible, but here Fo gives her the most devastating scene, pleading to be able to bring her son’s life to a close when he is in so much pain. Sara’s performance was remarkable, heartbreaking in our helplessness to help Mary.
Fo’s vignettes called on Frere and Sara to go from loud to quiet, humorous to gravely serious, chaotic to still at the last, and they did so with fire and grace.
Mistero Buffo was created with “tight constraints, limited budget, limited time and limited resources”, but Birch, Brown, Frere and Sara thrived, and it would be no surprise to see Riding Lights mount such a venture again.
Lighting up the stage: Cathy Sara in Mistero Buffo. Tom Jackson