A former Barnsley miner will reveal that Britain's got talent with his biblical epic performed by the community. Watch a preview in the stunning setting of Monk Bretton Priory.
A call comes in on John Kelly's mobile phone. It's Judas Iscariot.
"Yes Judas?" The conversation continues for a minute of two. "Okay, right Judas, thanks Judas, bye."
It's not clear if all the members of John Kelly's cast stay in character when they get in touch with him. Maybe God (to be played as a disembodied voice by Patrick Stewart) will ring in a moment? Probably not. Doesn't He usually communicate by other means, through a clap of thunder or something?
We are sitting in the bar of John Kelly's tiny theatre in Barnsley. The one-time miner created it by taking out a second mortgage on his house, and all that his investment bought at the time was a wreck of a building. With ingenuity it was transformed into a little gem called the Lamproom which survived for a decade without a penny of public funding.
It's now in it's 10th anniversary year and John Kelly is moving from this small, but perfectly-formed auditorium onto a broader stage. He's directing his own outdoor community version of a medieval Mystery Plays cycle in an arena at the ruins of the 13th century Monk Bretton Priory.
The total number in the cast and crew is nearly 200 – bigger than a capacity Lamproom audience of 187– and will play to 500 people a night for 12 nights.
There are no mysteries in the Mystery Plays. The name comes from the way each craft, or "mystery", in a town undertook to adapt and perform a Bible story to be part of a linked narrative from Creation to Last Judgement.
It was an enterprise which did not justify the ways of God to Man so much as bring them vividly to life by capturing the imagination of the unlettered.
Ordinary people were embedded in Catholic ritual, so instinctively responded to this extension of religion as theatre. These home-spun takes on familiar stories probably had an impact like today's Hollywood blockbusters. Audiences throughout the country turned out anticipating shock and awe and that's what they they seem to have got, with a bit of low humour thrown in.
We're not entirely sure, since most of their scripts were lost after the plays were banned. Four survive, mainly intact, including the York cycle of plays and the Wakefield cycle which were unearthed last century in Lancashire. A modern taste for them was re-discovered when York revived their cycle in 1951 as part of the Festival of Britain.
John has spent years studying them to create his English Mystery Plays which, he says, is 80 per cent new writing. "They can be very long and exceedingly tedious. I've condensed the greatest moments to about two hours, 15 minutes." He got the idea for a narrator he calls Bogoak from the Coventry Cycle and found Toby Stephen, a comedian and presenter on Radio Sheffield, to play the part.
John has also brought in Morris dancing, longsword dancing, medieval music and jesters for what he thinks is the only outdoor play of this sort taking place this summer in western Europe.
He is not one for received opinion where Bible stories are concerned. "I've got great sympathy for Judas from a theatrical point of view. Why does the poor chap have to spend his eternal life in the fires of Hell just because he's the one who had to move the storyline along?"
His show has a couple of interesting star names attached to it, apart from Patrick Stewart. Notes in the programme about the history of Mystery Plays are contributed by dangerous Becky Granger, the chavvy barmaid of the Rovers Return in Coronation Street. Her theme is that there's a theatrical void between Sophocles and Shakespeare and the Mystery Plays fill it.
In real life, Becky is John's elder daughter, Katherine Kelly, recently crowned best actress in the British National soap Awards.
The other name to leap out is Grace Kelly. This is not another ghostly-voice arrangement but a corporeal presence in the shape of John's younger daughter, who plays Eve. Grace Kelly, 19, is off to
Los Angeles to study acting when the show ends.
Her father's fascination with the medieval goes back 30 years. A school party from Worsborough High School went to York for the Mystery Plays which in those days were mounted every three years in the Museum Gardens against the backdrop of the ruins of St Mary's Abbey.
It impressed one of the school's teachers so much she devised her own. The vicar of St Mary's church in Worsborough moved some of the gravestones to make a little acting area and a local outdoor dramatic tradition was born. Later, John, then aged 33, was invited to play Jesus and he went on to direct or produce at Worsborough, bringing in semi- professional actors to bolster the amateur cast.
Three years ago, Barnsley Council asked John if he would attempt something grander in this vein with his own acting set-up, the Barnsley Secret Theatre Company. They promised a proper budget. He said no. "They sat me down and I said no again. In fact I said it three times. They didn't understand the vastness of it.
"Then we got to go and take a look at Monk Bretton Priory. It's funny, I used to live in Grimethorpe and passed it on the way to work and never really noticed it. But after that look around I was absolutely stunned. That did me. It had production values written all over it. That's the genesis."
As to his own beginnings, they are pretty unusual for the founder of a theatre and an acting dynasty. John left his Catholic comprehensive in Featherstone at the age of 15 with no qualifications. He put that right when he signed up to be a miner at Monkton Colliery and worked so hard he was crowned Yorkshire apprentice of the year for 1966. That gave him a leg-up to train as an electrician, but a long-term life underground was not to be.
Despatched on his motorbike to deliver a parcel for a fellow miner in a mental hospital, his eyes were opened to the fact that men could do this work. Within a day he had switched jobs and made a lifetime career out of psychiatric nursing instead.
The Lamproom came about after he headed a trust aiming to bring back theatre to Barnsley's Edwardian Theatre Royal. The way was blocked and John spotted in the pages of the local paper another building for sale. It's on a prominent position overlooking Barnsley and began life in 1792 as a chapel or meeting house. By the 1990s it required a giant step of the imagination to see any potential there.
A hammer and chisel were required to get inside and snow lay in a 30-foot drift against a wall. Windows were smashed and the only recent visitors had been flocks of pigeons and druggies whose detritus was scattered around. All the wiring had been stripped.
The make-do-and mend approach to turn things round blended cheek with adaptability.
Today, the auditorium's stepped flooring was once boarding belonging to a supermarket. "It was around the new Sainsbury's in Wakefield. I asked if I could have it when they were finished with it." The stage is constructed from pallets for which the Redfearn National Glass Company had no further use. A joiner put in the bar for nothing.
Trust volunteers brought their own special skills and the trust purchased the theatre from John for the same price he paid. He is now a trustee and has just been made president. As a figurehead, he will have more time to expand his writing horizons.
This autumn the Lamproom is putting on a trilogy of plays he wrote some time ago set in the Sixties. He won't be there to see them. In September he is off to Los Angeles for six months to find out more about how they write for television.
"I've got some writing pals over there who work for some of the big network comedy shows. The writers are in teams and it's amazing seeing at first hand how the shows come together. I'll be doing some writing on my own there. But I'm 58, maybe a bit too old to make it in television."
For the amateurs who come to have a go in the Mystery Plays, it's often a never-to-be-forgotten experience.
"A chap of six foot three and 18 stone came towards me in Barnsley market," says John. "He was all tattoos and bulging muscles. I went to step aside but he said, 'Remember me? I were a wave in 1983. I'd never done anything like that in me life. I never did again. Me mam's still got the photos on the mantlepiece'."
John's job, once a production is underway, is to think on his feet. "One night I counted 10 disciples. I asked the others about the missing two and they said, 'they've gone to a Queen concert'. I thought the audience were going to notice this when we got to the Last Supper and in the interval found two people in the audience to make up the dozen."
Another year, when John had a main part, his car broke down on the motorway as he drove to a performance.
He jumped out and ran across fields to the nearest house, calling out to a man in the garden: "Good evening, I'm Noah!" The man he was hailing turned out to be Arthur Scargill, who obliged by giving Noah a lift so he was just in time to catch the Ark.
English Mystery Plays, June 29 to July 11, Monk Bretton Priory, tickets 01226 321741
"Yes Judas?" The conversation continues for a minute of two. "Okay, right Judas, thanks Judas, bye."
It's not clear if all the members of John Kelly's cast stay in character when they get in touch with him. Maybe God (to be played as a disembodied voice by Patrick Stewart) will ring in a moment? Probably not. Doesn't He usually communicate by other means, through a clap of thunder or something?
We are sitting in the bar of John Kelly's tiny theatre in Barnsley. The one-time miner created it by taking out a second mortgage on his house, and all that his investment bought at the time was a wreck of a building. With ingenuity it was transformed into a little gem called the Lamproom which survived for a decade without a penny of public funding.
It's now in it's 10th anniversary year and John Kelly is moving from this small, but perfectly-formed auditorium onto a broader stage. He's directing his own outdoor community version of a medieval Mystery Plays cycle in an arena at the ruins of the 13th century Monk Bretton Priory.
The total number in the cast and crew is nearly 200 – bigger than a capacity Lamproom audience of 187– and will play to 500 people a night for 12 nights.
There are no mysteries in the Mystery Plays. The name comes from the way each craft, or "mystery", in a town undertook to adapt and perform a Bible story to be part of a linked narrative from Creation to Last Judgement.
It was an enterprise which did not justify the ways of God to Man so much as bring them vividly to life by capturing the imagination of the unlettered.
Ordinary people were embedded in Catholic ritual, so instinctively responded to this extension of religion as theatre. These home-spun takes on familiar stories probably had an impact like today's Hollywood blockbusters. Audiences throughout the country turned out anticipating shock and awe and that's what they they seem to have got, with a bit of low humour thrown in.
We're not entirely sure, since most of their scripts were lost after the plays were banned. Four survive, mainly intact, including the York cycle of plays and the Wakefield cycle which were unearthed last century in Lancashire. A modern taste for them was re-discovered when York revived their cycle in 1951 as part of the Festival of Britain.
John has spent years studying them to create his English Mystery Plays which, he says, is 80 per cent new writing. "They can be very long and exceedingly tedious. I've condensed the greatest moments to about two hours, 15 minutes." He got the idea for a narrator he calls Bogoak from the Coventry Cycle and found Toby Stephen, a comedian and presenter on Radio Sheffield, to play the part.
John has also brought in Morris dancing, longsword dancing, medieval music and jesters for what he thinks is the only outdoor play of this sort taking place this summer in western Europe.
He is not one for received opinion where Bible stories are concerned. "I've got great sympathy for Judas from a theatrical point of view. Why does the poor chap have to spend his eternal life in the fires of Hell just because he's the one who had to move the storyline along?"
His show has a couple of interesting star names attached to it, apart from Patrick Stewart. Notes in the programme about the history of Mystery Plays are contributed by dangerous Becky Granger, the chavvy barmaid of the Rovers Return in Coronation Street. Her theme is that there's a theatrical void between Sophocles and Shakespeare and the Mystery Plays fill it.
In real life, Becky is John's elder daughter, Katherine Kelly, recently crowned best actress in the British National soap Awards.
The other name to leap out is Grace Kelly. This is not another ghostly-voice arrangement but a corporeal presence in the shape of John's younger daughter, who plays Eve. Grace Kelly, 19, is off to
Los Angeles to study acting when the show ends.
Her father's fascination with the medieval goes back 30 years. A school party from Worsborough High School went to York for the Mystery Plays which in those days were mounted every three years in the Museum Gardens against the backdrop of the ruins of St Mary's Abbey.
It impressed one of the school's teachers so much she devised her own. The vicar of St Mary's church in Worsborough moved some of the gravestones to make a little acting area and a local outdoor dramatic tradition was born. Later, John, then aged 33, was invited to play Jesus and he went on to direct or produce at Worsborough, bringing in semi- professional actors to bolster the amateur cast.
Three years ago, Barnsley Council asked John if he would attempt something grander in this vein with his own acting set-up, the Barnsley Secret Theatre Company. They promised a proper budget. He said no. "They sat me down and I said no again. In fact I said it three times. They didn't understand the vastness of it.
"Then we got to go and take a look at Monk Bretton Priory. It's funny, I used to live in Grimethorpe and passed it on the way to work and never really noticed it. But after that look around I was absolutely stunned. That did me. It had production values written all over it. That's the genesis."
As to his own beginnings, they are pretty unusual for the founder of a theatre and an acting dynasty. John left his Catholic comprehensive in Featherstone at the age of 15 with no qualifications. He put that right when he signed up to be a miner at Monkton Colliery and worked so hard he was crowned Yorkshire apprentice of the year for 1966. That gave him a leg-up to train as an electrician, but a long-term life underground was not to be.
Despatched on his motorbike to deliver a parcel for a fellow miner in a mental hospital, his eyes were opened to the fact that men could do this work. Within a day he had switched jobs and made a lifetime career out of psychiatric nursing instead.
The Lamproom came about after he headed a trust aiming to bring back theatre to Barnsley's Edwardian Theatre Royal. The way was blocked and John spotted in the pages of the local paper another building for sale. It's on a prominent position overlooking Barnsley and began life in 1792 as a chapel or meeting house. By the 1990s it required a giant step of the imagination to see any potential there.
A hammer and chisel were required to get inside and snow lay in a 30-foot drift against a wall. Windows were smashed and the only recent visitors had been flocks of pigeons and druggies whose detritus was scattered around. All the wiring had been stripped.
The make-do-and mend approach to turn things round blended cheek with adaptability.
Today, the auditorium's stepped flooring was once boarding belonging to a supermarket. "It was around the new Sainsbury's in Wakefield. I asked if I could have it when they were finished with it." The stage is constructed from pallets for which the Redfearn National Glass Company had no further use. A joiner put in the bar for nothing.
Trust volunteers brought their own special skills and the trust purchased the theatre from John for the same price he paid. He is now a trustee and has just been made president. As a figurehead, he will have more time to expand his writing horizons.
This autumn the Lamproom is putting on a trilogy of plays he wrote some time ago set in the Sixties. He won't be there to see them. In September he is off to Los Angeles for six months to find out more about how they write for television.
"I've got some writing pals over there who work for some of the big network comedy shows. The writers are in teams and it's amazing seeing at first hand how the shows come together. I'll be doing some writing on my own there. But I'm 58, maybe a bit too old to make it in television."
For the amateurs who come to have a go in the Mystery Plays, it's often a never-to-be-forgotten experience.
"A chap of six foot three and 18 stone came towards me in Barnsley market," says John. "He was all tattoos and bulging muscles. I went to step aside but he said, 'Remember me? I were a wave in 1983. I'd never done anything like that in me life. I never did again. Me mam's still got the photos on the mantlepiece'."
John's job, once a production is underway, is to think on his feet. "One night I counted 10 disciples. I asked the others about the missing two and they said, 'they've gone to a Queen concert'. I thought the audience were going to notice this when we got to the Last Supper and in the interval found two people in the audience to make up the dozen."
Another year, when John had a main part, his car broke down on the motorway as he drove to a performance.
He jumped out and ran across fields to the nearest house, calling out to a man in the garden: "Good evening, I'm Noah!" The man he was hailing turned out to be Arthur Scargill, who obliged by giving Noah a lift so he was just in time to catch the Ark.
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