Beyond the Bayeux - History where it Happened

If you, like me, have felt a little bombarded by the hype around the Bayeux Tapestry - I mean, it has been sitting in a museum in Normandy for rather a long time - you may have wondered why I was going to see an entire show about it last night.

It was a tantalising pitch: a retelling of the story inside the actual ruins of Hastings Castle.  Live music, projections, actors you recognise from the screen and (rather wonderfully) you were invited to bring your own chair.  I have never had to bring my own chair to the theatre before.

So I set off with my niece and two yellow chairs from the garden, neither of us entirely sure what to expect. 

The intrepid theatre goers

You know it's going to be good when the poster looks like this!

There was something rather extraordinary about sitting inside the ruins of Hastings Castle while the story we think we know so well was taken apart and put back together around us.  James Purefoy and Ellie Westbrook performed; Muco and Lucie Treacher created the live musical world; and the ancient walls themselves became part of the production through Phil Davies and Battlecat Studios’ projected animation.  The whole thing was directed by Cathy Brady, with writing by Vanessa Farinha and Ellie Westbrook, alongside the scholarship and words of Bayeux historian Dr David Musgrove.  And that mixture was what made it so good.

It wasn’t history being dutifully explained to an audience.  Nor was it history being dressed up until all the inconvenient complexities disappeared. It was scholarship, storytelling, music, performance and place working together: sometimes genuinely funny - particularly the jester’s interjections into the wonderfully uncertain business of what Harold may or may not have promised - sometimes strange and sometimes genuinely moving.

One of the most evocative moments was the image of a woman fleeing a burning building with her child, projected across the ruined walls of the castle.  Suddenly this wasn’t simply the familiar story of kings, battles and succession.  It was a reminder of what invasion looks like to the people caught up in it.

The Bayeux Tapestry is particularly good material for this because it isn’t simply a neat illustrated account of “what happened in 1066”.  Even some of the things many of us were taught as facts are much less certain than we remember: it is an embroidery rather than technically a tapestry; it was probably made in England; and Harold’s famous arrow in the eye is open to question (but that's such a good story... do we need to change that?). 

Beyond the Bayeux seemed to relish that uncertainty rather than tidy it away.  Who is telling the story?  What gets left out?  There are, after all, only three women in the entire tapestry.  A stitch-up, perhaps?  What becomes accepted as truth simply because it has been repeated often enough?

Watching those questions play out within the remains of the castle itself felt wonderfully appropriate.  The setting wasn’t scenery.  It became another character in the production.  We heard the sea below us, watched arrows fly across the ancient walls and, as darkness fell, even the wind seemed to join in.  It was quite cold, but we had blankets.  

For Hastings, too, this felt exciting.  This was the castle’s first major open-air theatrical production, and I very much hope it isn’t the last.  I’ve heard rumours that Beyond the Bayeux may travel elsewhere, but there cannot be many places where history, landscape and performance can collide quite so spectacularly.

And there certainly aren’t many places where I can tramp across the hill carrying my yellow chair afterwards and still be home in time to take the dogs out.