Margery Kempe
&
The Fire of Love
The Fire of Love on Stage
Although it's embarrassingly frank at times, Kempe's autobiographical Book leaves us yearning for answers. Mystic, hysteric, saint or sham, she comes centre stage in my play The Fire of Love. Recently premièred in Wells-next-the-Sea, near Kempe's home town of Kings Lynn in Norfolk, UK, my play keeps Kempe's contradictions in tension, as she herself did.
Good reading, great theatre
With a cast of ten or a dozen, The Fire of Love suits amateur and professional groups alike, including open-minded church groups. (The première, reviewed here, cast a priest as the priest!)
Reflecting the Book, my final act tries Kempe on a charge of blasphemous obscenity with the audience as jurors. The final curtain leaves them to reach individual verdicts - if they can!
The Fire of Love script is available here with a cover showing Kempe in happier times - embarrassing her husband by mimicking their priest!
Kempe certainly divided opinion in her lifetime, as she still does today. This came about in many ways. For example, pregnant and nursing women excited Kempe as reminders - or apparitions - of the Virgin Mary and in a powerful scene of the play she serves as midwife at Christ's nativity, unaware that 'Mary' has gone away.
Judging Mary too young to have much milk she then proposes to feed him herself, causing shock and disgust to an onlooking priest.
These photos from the première show Kempe (played by Evette Price) so engrossed in her own reality as to make it real for the audience, too.
Everyone has a different view of Margery Kempe. To see what others have made of her visit Agony and Ecstasy, or to tell me what she means to you please get in touch.
Tony D Triggs
