'Mankind' at Hull Uni

As an audience, we kind of knew where Hull Drama Department's Mankind was going once the first character started speaking.

As Emily Napier paced onstage, hands clasped in prayer, rosary beads knocking against the robes marking her out as a Dominican friar, the feeling grew that a message was coming to our souls. Then, she ascended the pulpit – the only notable thing on the stage, apart from the two paintings, depicting Heaven and Hell – and announced her name and intention. Okay, so to describe Napier's character as a character is a bit misleading. She's playing Mercy, and that's not her name; it's what she is.

See, Mankind is a Medieval Morality play, and they were never big on individual characters and plot lines. Instead, the Morality play depicts personifications of broader concepts usually involved in some cosmic struggle for the soul of, well, mankind. It's where the idea of an Everyman comes from. In this case, Mankind is a character – played with a curiously brazen naivete by Felicity Rankin, until her final scene when the full weight of her wrong doing is evident in every sob and shake of her shoulders – over whom Jen Clarke's leery, crooked jester Mischief fights with Mercy.

As is standard Morality practice, Mankind faces temptation to leave his work and abandon his prayers, and thus his duty to God. That God is – though never seen – present throughout, the Dominican friars' motto 'Veritas', Latin for 'truth', being emblazoned across the back of a largely bare stage. It's a bareness that really focuses attention on the battle that is essentially happening within the soul or mind of each of us: the battle between toiling for the common good and indulging in personal enjoyment. That temptation takes the form of three representatives of worldly pleasure: Andrew Fowler's Newguise, who threatens to steal the show, Harriet Entwhistle's deceptively charming Nowadays and Ami Dawson's Nought, who relishes every chance to speak filth on stage.

Don't be fooled by the idea of the Morality play being nice and clean – it's a lesson to us sinners about what we should avoid. So the three worldly pleasures get to party for most of their stage time, and even bring in Jessica Duffield's imposing Titivillus (the Devil, to you and me). That lesson makes the church's presence painfully clear. Mankind isn't quite propaganda, though it's probably a good example of the Catholic church using art to persuade people that worship (in a church, not on your own terms) is a Very Good Thing. Mischief's greatest victory seems to be in persuading Mankind not to attend morning prayers – even though an omnipotent God would surely hear a prayer wherever it was said...

In the end, that may be Mankind's failing as a modern piece of theatre. It's far from subtle, and the word 'preachy' seems dying to attach itself to every moment of the stage time – not only during Mercy's sermons. Don't get me wrong, Napier delivers some very heartfelt moments without ever being patronising, but ultimately this is a piece of theatre designed to remind the masses what they owe to their overlords in the Catholic church, who very kindly mediate between them and their God.

When Napier enters, hundreds of years of theatrical history are wiped away, and we've been taken back to the didactic, characterless drama that went out of fashion around Shakespeare's time. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but this does function as a bit of a museum piece. It's interesting as a means of looking back at where later drama came from – for example English drama's move toward representative characters in increasingly realistic settings, before making the characters increasingly realistic too. Also – crushingly, for this performance – the power of the Catholic church and an audience's fear of God aren't what they were, which takes away much of this play's sting. Pity, really.