In 1633, with plague killing its neighbours, the Bavarian village of Oberammergau vowed to perform the passion of Christ every ten years if it were spared; the tradition counts its first performance in 1634, and the village has kept the vow, with wartime interruptions, ever since. The play is a civic institution of unique design: only natives and long-term residents may perform, some two thousand of the village's people take part between cast, chorus and crews, men grow their hair and beards for a year by council decree, and the production, running five hours in a purpose-built theatre before hundreds of thousands of visitors across a summer, effectively organises the village's decade. It is also the site of the genre's public reckoning with its worst inheritance.
Passion plays historically dramatised Jewish villainy as a stage convention, and their power to incite was not theoretical: pogroms followed medieval performances, and Hitler praised the Oberammergau play in 1934. After the Holocaust and the Second Vatican Council's repudiation of the deicide charge, Jewish organisations pressed for reform, and from the 1980s onward, decisively under director Christian Stueckl, Oberammergau rewrote its text: Jesus is presented as a Jew among Jews, Hebrew prayer is sung on stage, the crowd is differentiated, and the caricatures are gone. The 2022 production, delayed from 2020 by another epidemic, cast a Muslim villager in a leading role. The play's history thus contains both what the genre has been and what a community's sustained self-correction looks like.