Norfolk Home Learning
From small beginnings to great success
Play: 'For the Love of God'
My play For the Love of God is currently set to première in March 2025. It’s available worldwide for performance before or after that date.
Its central character, Margery Kempe, is surely an ideal subject for drama. She excited controversy in her medieval lifetime and she does so today. Mystic? Hysteric? Saint? Sham? The play keeps all these things in tension, as Kempe herself did.
While rooted in the Christian faith and therefore of special interest to churches, this is a 'warts and all' presentation of Margery Kempe, asking, 'Will she stop at nothing for the love of God?'
Suiting amateur groups and professionals alike, the play requires a modest cast and rewards straightforward staging techniques. When Kempe has visions of Jesus’ birth (where she acts as midwife) and also of his crucifixion, the audience sees with its mind’s eye what Kempe acts out in word and gesture.
Kempe lived in the busy port of Kings Lynn, UK, daughter of the mayor and wife of a wealthy burgess. Despite having up to 14 children she trekked for weeks to foreign shrines, sometimes pregnant, sometimes lame and often with only beggars to guard her.
But why only beggars? She did set out with pilgrim parties but her ranting self-righteousness drove her companions to give her the slip. ‘I never knew why they set off without me,’ she naively said on one occasion.
Drawing on her autobiographical Book, my final act puts Kempe on trial, accused of lewdness and blasphemy. The curtain falls as the jury begins its deliberations, leaving theatre-goes to reach their own verdict!
The leading lady must juggle Margery’s ill-matched traits. She’s a tender-hearted woman of God, making Mary ‘a nice hot drink’ as soon as Jesus is born and consoling her at the crucifixion, but she’s also a sanctimonious bluebottle – and unable to resist the marriage bed she vows to renounce.
Her husband John gives the play a tragicomic dimension. Older than Margery and somewhat senile, he defends her in court as best he can: ‘You ain’t going to hang my wife on no giblet. I tell you this: You ain’t going to hang my Marge on no giblet!’ Grabbing the judge's 'spetricals,' he stamps them to pieces then sobs with remorse at having done his Marge no good.
If you’d like to read For the Love of God with a view to a possible public performance please approach me via my contact form, giving details of your theatre, drama group or church and the role you play in it. Be sure to include your full address, with the name of your country if it’s non-UK.
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Tony D Triggs