The Knight of the Burning Pestle

KotBP title page, 1613 edition

This was a strange one. I wish I could get the soundtrack to it because it featured some good songs, including 'My jolly red nose'. The play's premise was as follows: a London grocer and his wife - the 'citizens' (Phil Daniels and Pauline McLynn) - go to see a play entitled The London Merchant. Soon after the play begins they interrupt it from their seats in the audience, insisting that the grocer's apprentice, Rafe (Matthew Needham), is given a part because grocer characters are underrepresented in plays. Rafe, a sweet, ordinary kind of young man, agrees, and adopts the character of the 'Knight of the Burning Pestle', carrying about a wooden pestle in a mystical glowing casket. Over the course of the play the grocer and his wife periodically interrupt the action, demanding that Rafe appear in varied scenes and guises of their own choosing. In the second half they demand to see him speak with a princess dressed in burnished gold, become King of the May, and command an army. There was also a demonic giant barber. A satire on chivalric romances, it was sillier, funnier, more arbitrary and entertaining than I'm making it sound.

The lack of a plot and the randomness of the action struck me as unusually modern for a play of that era. The idea of members of the audience giving a running commentary on a play also seemed modern, but I suppose it was done in a minor way in A Midsummer Night's Dream, when Hippolyta and Theseus watch and comment on the mechanicals' play. The contributions of the citizens do not consist only in stopping the play and putting forward their points of view. While the actors try to get the play back on track and continue with the original scenes, the citizens rustle paper, eat liquorice and offer it to other members of the audience, and talk loudly amongst themselves in the manner of stereotypical impolite theatre-goers.

My favourite character was definitely Old Merrythought (Paul Rider), a jolly, tubby, Father Christmas-like man who sings all the time and refuses to be melancholy about anything. Merrythought claims he would sing even upon seeing his sons on the gallows: 'Down, down, down they fall; Down, and arise they never shall.' When, later on in the play, he sees the coffin that he believes contains one of his sons, he does indeed sing. One of the Knight's squires, the 'dwarf' (a large man), also had some good songs, including one outside a castle where the Knight's party are to stay the night.

My favourite scene was possibly the one in which Rafe comes on as King of the May, accompanied by his entourage dressed as Morris dancers.

It was interesting to see this in the same week as Shakespeare in Love, as I have seen both plays described as 'a love-letter to London and the theatre'. I enjoyed all the references to London and its environs in KotBP; Hoxton, Mile End, Waltham Forest.

The theatre was festively decorated with festoons of greenery and dried oranges and a kissing bough suspended over the front of the stage. The music, played on seventeenth-century instruments, was as excellent as usual. The musicians wore Santa's elf-style hats. The costumes in general were bright and colourful - there was a lot of velvet and unlikely colours and nods to an earlier era. It was a good choice of play to see at this time of year; quite panto-ish. There was even a man dressed up as a woman (the princess).

Next: King Charles III