WHAT TO Know
york plays 2025
Many medieval spectators learned about Bible stories from these plays (since church services were in Latin). So they didn’t need any prior religious knowledge to enjoy them, and you don’t either.
Some spectators in 2025, if they consider the religious material in our plays to be sacred, may be unsettled by some playfully medieval approaches to it.
Other present-day spectators may too hastily associate anything Christian, including our plays, with histories of oppression (many of which had not yet happened when these plays were written down).
Anyone with strong feelings about religious content either way should consult our page on understanding medieval religious content (click here) before attending. It may only take a bit of historical context, and correction to common misunderstandings, for you to enjoy these plays a lot more.
RELIGIOUS
CONTENT
A few of the Y25 plays depict violent and disturbing material, likely too intense for children under 13 — if you wish to skip that material, consult our rough schedule to identify which play is which.
VIOLENT
MATERIAL
The 50 plays of Y25 (York Plays 2025) will run in 35 clusters, each produced and directed in medieval style by a different contributing group — click here for the full list of contributors and a rough schedule of the clusters — which will run for at least 18.5 hours total, probably longer. Spectators can come and go as they please and should not feel obliged to remain in the audience any longer than they feel comfortable doing so. It’s a long day — if you want to join us for all of it, that’s awesome, but you do not need to watch all plays from start to finish in order to enjoy them. And you can wander from play to play in whatever order you like.
COME & GO FREELY
There are no chairs set up at any of the stations. Most spectators will just sit on the ground. If you wish, you can sit on many of the stone steps and raised grassy areas at Burwash Quad to get a good view of a station; you can also bring your own portable chair if you wish. Medieval spectators moved about freely during shows: if you don’t like the view from where you are, you can move around wherever you like during the performances, as long as you stay back 1 meter from the wagon stages.
WE HAVE NO CHAIRS
Y25 will spread across Burwash Quad — a walled open-air campus space with paths and lawns — at three distinct gathering points: our performance stations. Generally, at each of these three stations there will be a different play, all running simultaneously.
In medieval style, about every 22 minutes, all the plays will shift to a new station by rolling the entire stage to the next spot. We have rebuilt replica medieval wagon-stages in order to do this. Those transitions, running 3-5 minutes, will create natural breaks between plays — there will be no other breaks scheduled (see above: you can come and go as you please).
Expect performers to walk on and off the wagon stages and among the audience wherever they happen to have gathered. Always stay back at least 1 meter from the wagon stages, especially while they are moving.
WAGONS & STATIONS
Unlike our medieval predecessors, we have ready access to indoor plumbing! YP25 is happening on the Burwash Quad, a walled field with a big building in the middle, the “Old Vic” building. Inside that building, which has an accessible entrance at its southeast corner, are washrooms and water fountains. We recommend bringing your own water bottle, to refill at the water fountain in Old Vic — especially if you plan to attend Y25 for the whole day, be sure to keep hydrated!
TOILETS
& WATER
We will not sell food at this event. Everyone who attends must arrange for their own meals, either by bringing their own and eating picnic-style on site while watching the plays, or by grabbing something from one of the many eateries on nearby Bay and Bloor Street (for grabbable food, we recommend Eataly, as well as Tim Hortons, Subway, Paris Baguette, and McDonald’s). And we have heard that some local food truck vendors may also be parking somewhere nearby — look for them! Remember, each of the plays will repeat at three different stations (see above) on the Vic Quad, so if you time food trips right, you won’t miss much.
No alcoholic beverages are allowed on the Vic Campus, though.
GO GET YOUR OWN FOOD
WEATHER PLANS!!!
Y25 is happening at the mercy of the elements and a very small budget. We are only able to rent the space for the weekend of June 7. If weather conditions (or any other catastrophes) make outdoor playing unsafe on Sat June 7, we will reschedule the remaining plays for Sun June 8. If weather conditions (or any other catastrophes) make outdoor playing unsafe on both Sat June 7 and Sun June 8, we will have to cancel the event entirely, with no further days available to reschedule. If you are making a major trip to come see Y25, be sure to check our homepage for announcements before you go.
As you’ll learn at our page on understanding medieval religious content (click here), medieval York’s players took for granted that everyone then in attendance was culturally Catholic. Centuries before the plays were written down, England’s leaders had cruelly de-legalized and expelled Jewish people from their kingdom; as a result, by the late fifteenth century, as much as York’s cultural Catholic community had a relatively flexible, freewheeling approach to their own religion, they inherited a gross ignorance of what any other religious cultures even look like. Non-Christian characters in late medieval English drama often swear by a weird grab-bag “other religion” which mixes together symbols and garbled names from Judaism, Islam, and Greco-Roman paganism.
The original texts of the York Plays resulted from the collaboration of multiple anonymous contributors across many generations; as a result, the original texts include multiple conflicting perspectives on non-Christians, ranging widely from inclusivity to hateful antisemitism. Our rules for updating texts require our Y25 participants to change the wording of the truly heinous bits (which appear in lines here or there, scattered across multiple plays)—that is the only material we are cutting from the original. We’re not trying to wipe historical antisemitism from the record here — but a free public performance, which multiple passers-by might come to see without any context, is a poor medium for an initial confrontation with historical hate. Instead, we recommend here that you check out the full original texts, including the parts we’ve deleted, in an updated-spelling edition here, or free of charge here in the original spelling. For ideas about how to process medieval drama’s antisemitic content, we suggest the relevant portion of Prof. Sergi’s lecture on “doxic” belief, and Daisy Black’s 2020 Play Time: Gender, Anti-Semitism and Temporality in Medieval Biblical Drama.
WHAT WE’VE DELETED
This event is free of charge — and it’s the sum of efforts of hundreds of people working without pay. When you attend Y25, don’t expect to be treated as a customer (that is, someone whom participants are trying to please, entice, or sell a product). Enter as your medieval predecessors did: as a fellow community member. Rather than expecting complaints to be accommodated by management (we have very few managers and their hands are full!), seek out your own solutions — and look for opportunities to help and support our efforts — maybe by picking up trash where you see it, maybe by solving the problem you notice, maybe by lending your voice with gusto to cheer on the performers. (This is the twenty-first century, though, so don’t touch the wagons unless you have signed up as a volunteer ahead of time and filled out a waiver.)
FRIENDS, NOT CUSTOMERS
There are many ways in which medieval approaches to live performance, built into surviving texts and witnessed in records, are more accessible and inclusive (i.e. in the modern sense of the word) than modern theatre.
For one, already baked into our plays are some of the current elements of Relaxed Performances: attendees can move around completely freely (including heading indoors, as needed, into the quieter area there) and can make noise as they wish. We can’t flag disturbing content as readily as modern theatres can, though, so be sure to consult our list of plays to plan ahead around disturbing content if you need to.
Also like our medieval predecessors, unfortunately, we aren’t able to provide any printed versions of the texts to audience members. The fifty distinct texts we’re working with will all be in various stages of copyright, pre-publication, and importantly of translation in and out of Middle English, so there’s no feasible way to manage shareable prints. That said, the style we’re working with is fundamentally iconic, meant to communicate the fullness of the story across multiple modalities of how folks engage with language and speech.
All of our outdoor performance stations are in open thoroughfares with ample paved, level areas. There may be a bit of unpredictability in how the wagon stages will be positioned — should this happen in a way that blocks off a needed path, just speak to one of our guides: all of our stages move, after all, so we can adjust easily as needed! (See above regarding accessible washrooms: the site’s built-in accessible pathway to get to the washrooms is rather out-of-the way, unfortunately, but it will still get you to where you need to be.)