An interview with Charlotte Steenbrugge (co-Translator) & Dylan Coley (Director)
For over sixty years, PLS has been recovering early plays that history left behind—banned, forgotten, or never staged at all. This season, we add another to that list: The Play of the Fluctuating Currency by Cornelis Everaert, written in 1530 in Bruges and withheld from performance in its own time because its critique of the powerful proved too pointed for the occasion. Nearly five centuries later, we’re finally giving it its world premiere. We sat down with the play’s English co-translator Charlotte Steenbrugge and director Dylan Coley to discuss bringing this remarkable piece of rhetorician drama to the modern stage.
This is the first English translation production of The Play of the Fluctuating Currency. What drew you to this particular play, Charlotte?
Charlotte Steenbrugge: I first came across it during my PhD, actually, when I was looking at devils and evil characters. This play doesn’t really have any of those, so I didn’t use it then. But I remember being struck by the clever and unusual use of metatheatricality, that playfulness with the boundary between the real world and the play itself. Later, when I was working on a project about how women are presented as theatrical agents—actors, spectators, and the like—it became one of my key texts because there aren’t very many representations of female spectators, and this one features one. It does really interesting things with it.
What should audiences know about the world this play came from?
Steenbrugge: It was written by a so-called rhetorician. The rhetoricians were men in the Low Countries—roughly modern-day Netherlands and Flanders—who gathered in chambers of rhetoric to write and perform poetry and drama. They were what we’d now call middle-class: respectable artisans, merchants, printers, teachers, painters, some priests. They were very keen to distinguish themselves from professional actors, who they really looked down on.
The play was written by Cornelis Everaert, a rhetorician from Bruges who was also involved in the cloth trade as a dyer and a fuller. Bruges had been an extremely rich city in the Middle Ages—called the Paris of the North—but by the 16th century it was in severe economic decline. The waterway linking it to the sea had silted up, Antwerp had become the dominant harbour, and Charles V’s wars were causing serious disruption. Everaert would have experienced these hardships firsthand, and several of his plays lament the deterioration of Bruges.
The play was actually banned from being performed. What happened?
Steenbrugge: Everaert notes in his manuscript that it was banned “because the truth was not hidden,” and that he wrote a replacement play which was performed. We don’t know who banned it—it could have been other members of the chamber, city officials, a priest, or a representative of Charles V.
The play was supposed to be performed on 24th April 1530, the first Sunday after Easter, as part of celebrations for the Peace Treaty of Cambrai and the coronation of Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor. But it’s not a very celebratory play. It criticizes Charles V’s inability to fix the value of coins, and it highlights the detrimental impact of economic issues on the citizens of Bruges, particularly the poor labourer. One can understand why publicly criticizing the Emperor’s shortcomings as a ruler would have been a rather delicate matter, and the tone of the play is certainly not appropriate for festivities celebrating the coronation of Charles V.
From the MS:
On Easter eve anno [15]30 I was forbidden to perform this play because it did not stifle the truth ….
Explained so clearly by me
[So reine verclaert = Cornelis Everaert]
I come to teach.
What makes this play theatrically interesting?
Steenbrugge: It uses a tableau—possibly acted by real people, possibly painted—revealed towards the end as visual proof of the argument and some of the costumes seem to be striking, so visually it should be a beautiful play to watch. Moreover, Everaert’s engagement with the audience is fascinating. Rhetorician drama doesn’t usually directly acknowledge the presence of the audience; its frequent use of pairs of characters suggests actors bounced off each other rather than off the audience. But Everaert appreciated the ludic boundary between actor and audience, playworld and reality, and his use of it is really rather sophisticated. That’s quite unusual.
Dylan, what made you want to take on this play?
Dylan Coley: I have worked on a number of PLS shows in the past, but this is my first foray into directing, and I could not ask for a better play to work on. Often when an old play is staged, I feel like there’s talk about how “it’s just so relevant to the current moment,” but I have truly never felt that more than working with Fluctuating Currency.
What do you mean by that?
Coley: Underneath the entertainment value and fun we are bringing to this production, there is a very real and scathing criticism being made about the ways those in power use religion, xenophobia, and good old-fashioned manipulation to suppress the voices criticizing them, and stop any potential coalition-building in its tracks before it can gain momentum. The way this play engages with issues of class, economic uncertainty, and power are on their own interesting enough for me to talk about for far longer than I have time for here.
What has surprised you most in the process?
Coley: One thing that has surprised me is how it engages with the role of the rhetorician—the one who writes and puts on the plays—and how theatre and entertainment can be used to both criticize and uphold those in power, sometimes at the same time. What does it mean to live in a time of economic uncertainty, when there feels like there is so little one person can do? What are our responsibilities to one another? To ourselves? What responsibilities does the governor have to those he governs? What lengths will he go to to avoid those responsibilities? And what the hell am I doing directing a play at a time like this?
Those are heavy questions.
Coley: Every time I work on a play, I ask myself what I am trying to accomplish with my work. This is the first time the play itself has asked me that same question, and I can only hope that my answer will come through in this production.
Charlotte, you mentioned that the play would have been acted by men only. Can you say more about that?
Steenbrugge: Women could be members of chambers of rhetoric in some regions, including Flanders and Bruges, but they weren’t allowed anywhere near the literary activities. They could come for social occasions and the religious side of things, but not literary things. They wouldn’t have been allowed to write poetry or plays or to perform in rhetoricians’ drama. So the play would have been acted by men only, which I think is of some interest given the importance of ‘difficult’ female characters in this play.
The play disappeared after Everaert copied it into his autograph collection. What does that mean for this production?
Steenbrugge: As far as we know, it was never performed at the time, and it doesn’t seem to have circulated in any way. You guys may well be staging the world premiere, so no pressure there.
Coley: No pressure at all.
The Play of the Fluctuating Currency receives its world premiere in this new translation by Charlotte Steenbrugge and Else Strietman, directed by Dylan Coley. Everaert’s play comes to life on one of PLS’s newly built replica pageant wagons, recreating the conditions of early modern performance and exploring what a manuscript alone cannot reveal. This production is sponsored by The Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies (CRRS) with support from The Jackman Humanities Institue (JHI).
Show times:
- Thursday, October 15, 6pm
- Friday, October 16, 6pm
- Saturday, October 17, 2pm
Outdoor Location:
Victoria College Campus (73 Queen’s Park Crescent, at the south entrance of Victoria College)
Rain locations:
- October 15 & 16: Victoria College 115
- October 17: Emmanuel College 119