Unlocking the Secret Soul: Mary Kelly, Pioneer of Village Theatre

Abstract

Though little remembered or honoured today, Mary Kelly (1888–1951) was one of the more enlightened among those who, between the wars, encouraged the then-booming amateur theatre into attempting more than the limp reproduction of West End successes. She had a strong belief in the intrinsically dramatic potential of the country dweller, imbued with generations of traditional lore: but unlike many of her more nostalgic contemporaries, Mary Kelly well recognized the class conflicts and history of deprivation of the rural poor, and blended such elements into the pageants she devised not only for her own village but for other rural communities – and which she encouraged others to emulate through her instructional writings. Mick Wallis, Reader in Performance Studies at Loughborough University, has written on modern-day pageantry in his two-part article on ‘Pageantry and the Popular Front’ in NTQ 38 and 41 (May 1994 and February 1995), and in ‘Delving the Levels of Memory and Dressing-up in the Past’ in Inter-War Theatres, edited by Clive Barker and Maggie Gale, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. His millennium show, In the Twenty-First Century Everyone Will Be Stelarc for Fifteen Minutes (Rehearsal for a Ceremonial Event), with Jan Overfield and Movements in Mayhem, was premiered at Loughborough in December 1999.