Where do the Costumes Come From?

The Mystery Plays are an interesting genre of theatre: "community production" is the name, which means that the participants are mostly volunteer augmented with a few key professionals. For the actors, that professional is Jesus - a demanding role if there ever was one. For the entire production, there's a main director (Philip Breen) and then a bevy of assistant directors and a number of others overseeing various aspects of what makes a play like this actually happen.

The costume supervisors are Fran Brammer, Fiona Parker, and Lorraine Ebdon. I haven't yet met Lorraine, but Fiona has been the one overseeing the growing collection of (partially) finished costumes as they materialize, while Fran oversees the translation of written directions into actual costumes. Fiona says: "add rough braid", Fran says: "looks good!" when you show her what you're contemplating and what you've done. There's an excellent description of the costume work and some of my fellow costumers at this link: Behind the Scenes: Creating the Fabric.

Like the "volunteer" and "professional" people working on the play, the costumes can also be classified into two groups: "made-on-site" (volunteer) and "hired" (professional).  A number of the grander outfits are "hired" - the robes of some of the Roman royalty involved, for example. But most of the others, from angels to devils to crowd scenes, are "made-on-site." An excellent pattern which gives the basic shape for the dress of the time is McCalls 2060:

From what I have seen of the costumes, though, there were other patterns - more underarm gussets, cross-over fronts, various styles of sleeves. All of these were finished before I got there, by the great team of volunteer women I'm just getting to know. We've been doing various things to them, of which "rough braid" is only one.

"Hired" costumes are a different kettle of fish: they often need adapting, but must be adapted in such a way that the adaptation can be reversed when the costume goes back to where it came from. An example we worked on was this already well-worn item:



It was once a sumptuous coat and from a distance still is, but it was too short for the purpose and so a band of red velvet had to be added (by hand - it had to be reversible, plus there were lead weights in the hem which couldn't go under the machine - you get the picture). It all looked rather chunky and slapped-on until we added braid to highlight the new line between the jade and the red. Another lesson recalled: if something doesn't look quite right, emphasize it.