Skirting Heresy (The Story of Margery Kempe of Lynn) with Vanessa Wood-...

"Skirting Heresy" is the title of an epic play by New York author Elizabeth MacDonald which I edited for a production in Lynn Minster in 2018, mainly adding several existing songs from a previous play of my own which which you'll find on the Peacock's album  peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/a-mas…for-margery and - in different versions - on the album the Penland Phezants ( Andy Wall, Vanessa, Melanie and me) created for the Skirting Heresy show. Andy and Vanessa wrote the folk tunes; I wrote the lyrics and the beat-based rap and chant bits. The "Skirting Heresy" score is collected on thepenlandphezants.bandcamp.com/album/son…ery-kempe
This track "Skirting Heresy" using the title of the play as a refrain was written by Andy and I to cover a lengthy curtain call for the epic cast of 70 and to tell the whole story of the Book in a summary form. We both rather extended ourselves and we were all still performing it about 4 minutes after the epic curtain call ended! I recall pointedly singing "You're a menace to churchman but a mystic to me" to possibly the least facilitating churchman ever to host a play about one of his most famous ancestral parishioners.
This is the abridged Peacock version. The full Peacock version is here-  soundcloud.com/gareth-calway/skirting-heresy-in-full
The lovely upbeat Andy-led folk performance is on the Phezants album link above. This version features the three other performers on that track (adding Vanessa's beautifully measured harp to our usual Peacock duo) taking it somewhere more mediaeval.

Margery Kempe, the Visonary'sTale

 

 

 

 

All pictures by Al Pulford

The same bed. 40 years earlier. 1394.

Margery: (on bed, howls, ante-, mid- and post-natal) Oh Jesus! Twenty years of age, married to a worshipful burgess of Lynn and quickly with child as nature would have it. And it’s hell on earth! (living this) Devils opening their mouths all alight with burning flames of fire, pawing at me, hauling me about both night and day, menacing me to deny God, family, virtue and the Christian faith.


She self-harms violently, bites her hand ‘scarring it for life’, tears ‘the skin of her body near her heart with her nails pitilessly.’

(to audience) Post-natal depression you call it? (putting us right on that) Eight months straddling the eternal pit, between the devil and the unshriven dread of my confessor, I desired all wickedness (strait-jacket arms) and had to be tied up in case I killed myself! 

 

 

 

Read the full play, plus related prologues by Margery's parish priest the Lollard William Sawtrey, her Scribe, her father and a version  for a full cast, including all these characters  and with extensive press features, afterwords and research items here