A 15th-century priest, an 'antic comedy', and what medieval humour owes the present
The RSC's summer staging of a fifteenth-century morality play lands as the genre's loudest case for itself in years. The contract with the audience, as always, is the difficult part.
On a wet Tuesday in Stratford-upon-Avon, in the second week of a six-week run that began on 19 June 2026, the Royal Shakespeare Company opened a new staging of a fifteenth-century morality play and discovered that the audience laughed in the wrong places. Or, depending on your tolerance for clerical hypocrisy and bodily function, exactly the right ones. The piece in question, billed as the company's contribution to the summer's heavy calendar of medieval-set British stage work, runs at the Swan Theatre through late July and has already drawn the kind of split verdict that says less about the production than about the genre's unresolved contract with its viewers.
The Guardian's review, published on the morning of the second performance, framed the evening as an "antic comedy" in the technical sense: a sub-genre of medieval and Tudor theatre in which the sacred is inverted for comic ends, virtue is rewarded and vice is humiliated, and the principal agents of chaos are not devils but clergy. That designation does important work. It separates the production from the better-known mystery cycles, with their processional solemnity, and from the later allegories of moral earnestness, with their diagrammatic pilgrims. An antic comedy is interested in laughter as a form of correction. It assumes the audience can recognise a fraudulent priest because it has met one.
The lineage the genre refuses to shake
Medieval-set British stage work is a category with conventions, and the conventions are mostly inherited complaints. Critics reaching for the genre tend to reach for the same handful of reference points: the Wakefield Master's second shepherd's play with its sheep-stealing rub, the theatrical sacrilege of the Summoning of Everyman, the foul-mouthed devils of the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, and the bureaucratic afterlife of the late medieval interludes. These are not decorative citations. They are the period's standing argument with itself about what a stage is for, and any new production enters the conversation whether it intends to or not. The RSC's current staging is unusual less for the play it has chosen than for the company it keeps: a summer that has also delivered a televised prequel in the Legally Blonde franchise (Elle, reviewed in the Guardian this week as a "tropey" re-run of Reese Witherspoon's performance from twenty-five years ago) and a holiday horror comedy teaser from the Canadian distributor Blue Finch Films, in which a grandson announces his intention to kill his grandmother. The juxtaposition is unfair to all three productions, but it is the condition of the calendar.
What the antic convention actually does
An antic comedy in the technical sense is built on three commitments, none of which the modern stage handles automatically. The first is theological literacy without theological deference: the audience must know enough about the host, the confessional and the indulgence trade to recognise when they are being abused on stage, and the play must be willing to abuse them. The second is a comic energy that descends from above rather than below. The jokes land on the institution, not on the laity; the peasant characters are usually innocent, the clerical ones usually venal, and the structural irony is that the audience is being asked to laugh at the very authority the play formally depends on. The third is a tonal contract that holds across several hours. The genre cannot afford to settle into satire, because satire presumes a stable moral position; nor into farce, because farce requires a clock. It needs to oscillate.
The current production, by the available evidence of the Guardian's notice, holds the oscillation. The review singles out a sequence involving a pardoner selling bogus relics as the production's clearest inheritance of the Wakefield manner, and a closing scene of judgment that manages, against the odds, not to feel sententious. The reviewer is careful with praise and unstinting with description; the verdict is that the company has produced a staging which earns its genre rather than endures it.
The audience problem the genre cannot solve
The harder question is the audience. Medieval-set British stage work of this kind tends to draw two constituencies that do not always overlap. There is the specialist constituency, which arrives already briefed on the manuscript tradition, which knows which play survives in a single folio and which was printed by Wynkyn de Worde, and which treats any directorial softening as a betrayal. There is the general constituency, which arrives because the RSC has put something on at the Swan and trusts the company to do the work of mediation. The gap between the two is not new. The Wakefield Master's plays have always been a test case: rude, learned, and tonally strange, they reward the reader who can hold Latin quotation marks in the same head as a stolen sheep. The current production's reception will be read, in part, as a referendum on whether the RSC is still willing to programme for both.
There is also a third constituency that the genre has historically suppressed and that the modern stage cannot quite ignore: the audience member who comes for a night out and finds themselves watching a play about a priest being mocked for selling fake saints' bones. The discomfort is productive. It is the discomfort the medieval writers were writing into the form in the first place.
Stakes for a small genre on a crowded summer
The summer of 2026 is not a quiet one for stage and screen. Beyond the RSC's medieval run, the cultural calendar this week has included the first teaser for the Blue Finch Films holiday horror comedy Unholy Night, in which the central exchange ("What're you gonna do?" / "I'm gonna kill grandma.") sets the tone for a feature that the distributor is plainly marketing on shock value. The same week's cultural pages have carried the Guardian's review of the Elle prequel, a piece that finds the new casting charismatic but the script tropey and the campness muted, and a Variety analysis of LeBron James's decision, communicated on the first day of NBA free agency, to leave the Los Angeles Lakers for another franchise. None of these is a direct competitor to a Swan Theatre run of fewer than fifty performances. All of them are competing for the attention span that decides whether a small medieval genre revival finds an audience or quietly closes.
The bet the RSC is making is that the genre can survive the summer's noise. The bet is plausible. Medieval-set British stage work has always been a minority taste that the institutions of British theatre have periodically decided to subsidise anyway, on the argument that the form is part of the national repertoire whether or not it pays its way. The current production's job is to make that argument feel, for two hours at the Swan, less like a subsidy and more like a service. By the available evidence, it is doing the work.
What to watch when the run ends
The run closes in late July. The review record will settle within a week; the box office will settle within two; the genre's standing will take longer to read, and will depend on what the company programmes next winter, and on whether the Universities of Bristol and Toronto continue to digitise the manuscript record at the pace of the last decade. None of that is the production's problem. Its problem is the smaller and more theatrical one: whether, on a wet Tuesday in Stratford, the audience laughed at the right things.