Lepers, Book Of Job And A Festival That Isn't Afraid To Show Its Workings

A scratch performance about medieval lepers was just one of hundreds of events at this year's Ripon Theatre Festival—but as an opening statement, it was a bold one.

It is a good sign, and an increasingly rare one, to see a theatre festival so thoroughly supported: excellent productions, wonderful venues, a well-curated programme and, above all, outstanding community involvement. Festivals come and go, but the growth and development of Ripon Theatre Festival through collaboration is something its trustees and director can be genuinely proud of. It is distinctive, and it sets Ripon apart through its collaborative spirit and determination to offer a programme diverse enough to capture the imagination of everyone from five-year-olds to nonagenarians, taking in every generation between.

As a music critic, I love attending classical programmes, but they have to be innovative and alert to their audience—something the excellent Harrogate Festival, just up the road, manages with aplomb. Ripon, by contrast, still has one foot in the past when it comes to classical music. The theatre festival, though, hits the nail on the head.

This year's fifth festival features approximately 160 events, and none of them can provide a comprehensive overview of the entire festival. But a festival reveals a good deal about itself in what it chooses to open with, and Ripon opened not with a safe, finished crowd-pleaser but with something still being written – literally.

Outcast is a new play by the Ripon writers Andy Croft and Paul Mills, brought to life brilliantly by the York-based Out of Character Theatre Company, whose ensemble draws on members with lived experience of mental ill health. It is set among a community of lepers scraping out an existence on the margins of medieval Ripon, and it announces a welcome new strand for the festival: a commitment to developing new writing and creating opportunities for artists across Yorkshire and the North East.

The afternoon began, fittingly, at St Mary Magdalen's Leper Chapel, where Croft and Mills talked us through the history and politics underpinning the piece—poverty, control, and environmental collapse—themes that map with uncomfortable precision onto the present day. From there, the audience decamped to the Arts Hub (surely it is time someone rebranded it the Ripon Arts Theatre; the name would do wonders for both clarity and tourism) for a scratch performance of selected scenes, followed by a discussion that will directly shape where the writers take the play next.

This splitting of the experience across two venues was a first for the festival, and it paid off handsomely. Hearing the writers set out their intentions before watching the actors test the material gave the whole afternoon the feel of eavesdropping on a creative process rather than simply consuming a finished product. Croft described the strange experience of seeing characters who had "existed only in your head" finally walking and talking in front of him, while the company's artistic director, Kate Veysey, spoke of how the play's preoccupations with community and stigma echo the work Out of Character does every day and how rehearsals had already thrown up unexpected conversations about collective fear in a community—the pandemic, inevitably, came up.

What struck me most was the range the afternoon covered in barely two hours: comedy sat alongside pain, desire alongside shame and endurance, and the writers drew a startling parallel between their leper community and the Book of Job — a wealthy, righteous man stripped of everything by a wager between God and Satan, left to wrestle with the question of why the innocent suffer. It was a heavy weight for a scratch performance to carry, but it carried it.

The Q&A afterwards ranged just as widely, from what television soaps quietly teach us about ourselves to the curious fact that Anglo-Saxon had no future tense—a detail that lodged itself in my mind rather more than I expected it to, given how squarely the play is concerned with characters who have no future to speak of. The actors, doubling and trebling roles with character names hung round their necks scratch-night style, prompted a lively debate on whether make-up and prosthetics were needed at all or whether the leprosy of the imagination was more powerful than anything a costume department could offer.

It is, in short, exactly the kind of theatre I want to see more of: expert, collaborative, and unfinished in the best sense, with writers, actors, and audience all working together on what the piece might yet become.

Whether Outcast itself ever reaches the stage in finished form is, in a sense, beside the point of Sunday's afternoon. What mattered was the demonstration of trust — in the writers, willing to hand over work they had nursed for two years and ask a room of strangers what should happen to it next; in the actors, reading scenes cold and thinking aloud about make-up and prosthetics they hadn't yet settled on; and in an audience invited not merely to watch but to help decide.

Tickets for the festival's bigger productions later in the week are already selling well, so this was never a case of Ripon needing to hedge its bets. It was a deliberate choice: to open with a stage whisper rather than a roar, and trust the audience to lean in.

Ripon Theatre Festival's fifth year has hundreds of events and productions still to come, most of them a good deal louder than this one. But on this evidence, it's the whisper that will stay with me longest.

For more information on Ripon Theatre Festival click here