Passion Play

Christian drama was born inside the liturgy. The tenth-century Easter ceremony known from its opening words as the Quem quaeritis, whom do you seek, staged the angel's question to the women at the tomb with two groups of singing clergy, and from that seed grew a whole literature of liturgical plays. As the drama moved out of the choir into the churchyard and the market square, it changed language and scale: by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the towns of Europe were mounting vernacular passion and cycle plays lasting days, financed by guilds, with hundreds of performers, elaborate machinery for heaven and hell, and scripts that survive in great compilations from France, Germany and England.

The passion sequence, from the entry into Jerusalem through the crucifixion to the resurrection, was the emotional centre, designed to move spectators to compassion and penitence in line with the affective piety of the age. The Reformation broke the tradition in Protestant lands, and Catholic authorities of the Enlightenment era, distrusting popular spectacle, suppressed much of what remained; Bavaria banned passion plays in 1770 and Oberammergau had to petition for exemption. What survived did so where community ownership was strongest, in the Alpine villages, in Spain and its colonies, and in forms as varied as the Via Crucis processions of Latin America and the sung Pabasa of the Philippines, all descendants of the medieval instinct that the central story of the faith should be seen, wept over and walked through, not only heard.

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.