Well, our first shot at a period play didn't go as well as we would have liked, but we figured we'd take another shot. Rose (my apprentice) dug up and shortened (again, this was much longer in the original) this play, and we tried again.

This one turned out a lot better.

This performance was done at the first of the Phoenix Theatres -- the concept of having an event (or part of an event) with a stage where various types of performances can be done was completely that of Rose and Juan, and despite the fact that the West Kingdom seems to be stuck in the "it's not an event unless there's fighting" mode, has done ok. Basically, after this first event, Rose (who's done the autocratting for these) started combining them with other events ...

Synopsis: A standard theatrical troupe is preparing to put on "The London Merchant", the prologue comes out to give the usual opening bits, when a merchant in the audience decides he wants to see something different! He and his wife end up seated on stage (in period, a place of honor), and their apprentice is cast as "The Knight of the Burning Pestle" (the pestle and mortar being symbols of the Merchant's Guild ...). The merchant and his wife kabitz throughout the whole show. The troupe of actors is still trying to do the show they had originally planned on, but they have to keep catering to the whims of the merchant and his wife (so that they'll shut up!), and it makes for a really interesting mix. We hammed this one up quite a bit, overacting, silly props, and generally had a blast with it.

Wulfric had even more fun, as he had stuffed his purse with chocolate coins, and was handing them out to actors, and to audience members at some points. During the curtain call, he even paid me ...

Incidents: We did this one twice. The first time was at the Phoenix Theatre event. This was hard on Rose, who besides being in the show, was also the autocrat. The problem was that without realizing it, we had scheduled against the Darkwood White Shield tournament, which is a very popular tourney in the South Bay area ... most of the acts for the Phoenix theatre left when they were done with their part of the show (some members of the Kingdom Choir had colds, the rest had whatever other reasons that they had ... we were rather disappointed with the fact that they didn't stick around), which meant that the audience kept getting smaller, and smaller ...

This meant that attendance was not great. This show was the last item on the agenda, and after quite a few really good acts before it (including Hilarie the Puppeteer and Bjorn of Bearhaven's puppet show about The Golden Apples ("How many legs do you have to put on a horse before you get a smooth ride?" -- Odin)), we went on with an audience that was about the same size as the cast.

However, the show went well, the actors put everything they had into it.

We did the second show in Fettburg at a Pas d'Arms that was being held there. Baron Cybi is still apologizing for this -- unfortunately, the Pas went on too long, and we had two audience members. We had a really good tape going, too, until the battery ran out in the last half hour. ACK!

As a side comment, I understand that the Barony of Carolingia in the East has done a version of this show as well, cut down to about 45 minutes. Ours was 2 hours long.

Video Tape: Yes. It's at a bit of an angle, as we didn't manage to get a tripod to the event. We used a stand of some sort, but didn't have it as level as we thought. You sorta get used to it -- the angle's not too bad. We used Bonefinder's camera for the show ... if we'd been thinking about it, we would have taped the puppet show and some of the other acts ... oh well.

DVD: Now available, contact Hirsch for details (probably $5-10, just to cover the cost of the discs, the case, etc. and any postage would need to be tacked on).

Photos: Photos by Hal Ravn are at the West Kingdom History site: Photos of The Knight of the Burning Pestle.

The Script:
The Knight of the Burning Pestle: Acrobat

(Note: this is (like Ralph Roister Doister) the version of the script we actually performed from. The original is much longer ... we left the endnotes in, as well ...)

The Cast:

(The back of the program was not very exciting ... we had too much else to worry about!)