The Play on a Cart

Methynke, alas, that I must be gone

To make my rekenynge, and my dettes paye;

For I se my tyme is nye spent awaye.

Take example, all ye that this do here or se,

How they that I loued best do forsake me,

Excepte my Good Dedes that bydeth truely.

--Everyman

As dusk sifted last week around the bleak brick flats that have replaced the even bleaker dockside slums of London's East End, tired factory workers settling down for another evening in front of the telly were roused by a clangorous racket. Peering into the almost-deserted, cement-paved play area of Boyce Way, they made out a brown-robed, sturdily striding figure swinging a schoolbell and shouting: "Come to the play on a cart!"

Coaxed outside by a squad of doorbell pushers, some four dozen of the flat-dwelling workers, wives and children watched in a light drizzle as a team of men and women hauled a sizable rubber-tired cart into position at one end of the playground. Quickly the cart pullers--parishioners of nearby St. Philip's Church--set up three canvas walls (painted to resemble an East End living room) on the rough-planked cart, tapped a nearby flat for electricity to operate the homemade floodlights. Then the bell swinger--Father Oswald, Anglican priest in charge of St. Philip's and a member of Britain's Society of St. Francis--blessed his troupe of parishioners, who made the sign of the cross and climbed onto the cart to revive a medieval custom, the morality play.

Written by one of Father Oswald's Franciscans, Passion on Paradise Street concerns a vicar who pays an unaccustomed call on a nonchurchgoing family and is rudely rebuffed. Both the vicar and the head of the family die, and after death bicker bitterly about why they did not get along. Then the first scene is played over, this time showing the joy and harmony that result when the family welcomes the vicar.

East Enders grouped in front of the cart or watching diffidently from their doorways spattered applause throughout the half-hour play, guffawed occasionally at the dock-flavored cockney. Two white-haired women joined in the responses when the family in the play took Communion with the vicar, and the rest of the audience nodded approvingly as points were hammered home.

Presented throughout the dock area twice a year for the past two years, the morality plays have become an East End institution. By their charities, austere life and hard work, the Anglican Franciscans have impressed East Enders, who at first were apt to dismiss them as so many practitioners of the "soul racket." But the East End is still overwhelmingly unchurched. To Father Oswald the plays' purpose is the same one that sent 15th century Christians into England's streets to perform the classic morality play Everyman (in which God dispatches Death to demand an immediate "rekenynge" from the happy-go-luckless hero): to reach those who will not come to church and present Christianity to them in simple, vivid terms. Says Father Oswald: "You see, the spoken word is not good enough nowadays. There is no good giving them beautiful words and lovely thoughts; the people are used to the cinema and TV. We must give them something they can see."

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