ABSTRACT
Mummers’ plays started life as a cadging tool. The idea of Christmas performance, like the usage ‘mummer’, can signify both the old and the contemporary. The potential patron was already amenable, but the mummers had yet another component working in their favour: the wealthy and fashionable, along with representatives from the great and the good were themselves using theatre as a centre point for their Christmas parties and other social assemblages. The twentieth-century evidence, which is generally more helpful in its contextual detail, throws up many examples of mummers’ plays coming and going, appearing and disappearing, and as intentional ‘for-one-night-only’ events. Mummers’ plays have a remarkable capacity to remind us of their own past performances in the present moment of our watching. Like the pioneers of the folk revival, those who continue to be drawn to mummers’ plays come from a variety of backgrounds and bring a range of agendas.
