Special to the Toronto Star
WWE players get medieval
15th-century drama a lot like wrestling It's all about blood, pyrotechnics and sex
By Andrew Clark
August 14th, 2004

"I just became bad," says wrestler Trish Stratus by telephone. "I went over to the dark side two months ago."

It is 2004 and the five-time World Wrestling Entertainment Inc. (WWE) Women's Champion performs as much for television cameras as she does for her live audience and yet, whether she realizes it or not, her admission could just have easily been uttered by an actor performing in a 15th century morality play. In fact, when Stratus and her WWE compatriots bring SummerSlam to the Air Canada Centre tomorrow, they and their tens of thousands of fans and millions of pay-per-view customers will become unknowing participants in an enormous exercise in medieval theatre.

Theatre is the most enduring of the performing arts. It does not change so much as reinvent itself. In the 1980s, I studied theatre history at York University and what I learned there I still apply to my writing or observation of popular culture. Today's sitcom, for example, is nothing more than Roman farce shot by three cameras. A working knowledge of the ways in which previous generations staged drama enables one to recognize patterns in our own age. Even in professional wrestling.

As a student I found few genres as fascinating as the morality plays which flourished in Western Europe during the early 15th century. Prior to this, drama had been strictly liturgical but as professional guilds grew more affluent they began staging more secular plays, ones concerned primarily with the individual's relationship with God and his desire for salvation. These "morality plays" were didactic and played out an allegorical battle between the vices that tempted man and the virtues that might save him.

In plays such as The Castell Of Perseverance and Mankind, sin and salvation were personified and they battled furiously for the soul of the Everyman.

Morality plays relied on shocking spectacle and special effects. Naturally, the vice figures (with names such as Carnal Lust and Concupiscence of the Eyes) were the most interesting. These creatures often emerged from a flaming hell's mouth and spoke directly to the audience. When they snared a soul they were merciless in their torments. The mostly illiterate medieval audiences loved them and they cheered for good and booed the bad.

Fast forward 600 years and we have WWE. Like medieval morality plays, wrestling relies on a battle between good and evil. In Mexico, a priest named Fray Tormento battles a villain named Damian 666. In WWE lingo, it is a struggle between baby-faces and heels. Storylines are scripted and each wrestler's character (such as the Undertaker) personifies a virtue or vice figure. Just as actors in morality plays addressed their audiences directly, so too do the wrestlers of WWE take time out to taunt the audience. There is blood, pyrotechnics and sex.

Medieval morality plays found their plots in the everyday lives of their audiences. They were allegorical psychomachia, externalizations of the psychological struggles that faced medieval audiences. In the Dutch morality play The Voluptuous Man (which I directed at York in 1986), a lad of leisure asks himself, "Who cares about heaven if life is like this?" He encounters a host of vice figures who take him to the Inn of Worldly Pleasures, where he indulges himself. Then God's Wrath shows up and he pays a heavy price.

Wrestling is a contemporary take on the morality play formula and at WWE events, one can find the sort of psychological conflicts usually displayed on shows such as Jerry Springer.

At tomorrow's SummerSlam, the virtuous Matt Hardy will battle the diabolical Kane in an event titled "Till Death Do Us Part." The match has a saucy backstory. In a bid to prevent her boyfriend Hardy from getting a beating, WWE wrestler Lita agreed to have sex with Kane. It was only one night, but Lita is now pregnant and she is not sure who the father is. No matter, the winner of the SummerSlam match will earn the right to marry her.

As in a morality play, temptation, retribution and redemption are the order of the day. Toronto-bred wrestler Trish Stratus began her career as a baby-face but she has now turned heel. Two months ago Stratus dumped boyfriend Chris Jericho and took up with his best friend Christian. The turn developed over eight months with the aid of WWE's team of writers and producers.

"No one expected it," says Stratus, who likens the WWE to a prolonged soap opera. "It was a complete 180." The move enraged fans. As one erudite wrestling enthusiast wrote on the Web, "U 2 faces trish everybody on the earth who waz ur fan hates u after u decieved the chris Jerico."

But what are they fighting for? In morality plays it was the eternal soul of mankind that was at stake. To a society where death was ever present, this was a tangible concern. In the WWE the stakes are not so elevated.

"You are trying to get a reaction from the crowd," explains Stratus.

The spectacle reflects our secular society, where truth and meaning are defined by power. In the WWE, if you lose, you catch a beating. If you win, you apply the beating. Take the case of Stratus, who began her career playing WWE owner Vince McMahon's mistress. In a notorious TV segment, McMahon forced Stratus to strip down to her skivvies and crawl around on all fours while barking like a dog. The incident launched Stratus's career as a wrestler. Never again would a man treat her like that!

Each age likes to compare itself to the ancient Greeks, but the reality for the digital age is that we are far more similar to the serfs and nobles of the Middle Ages than we are to the Platonic ideal, and pro wrestling is our allegorical exercise in cartoon totalitarianism. The victor is a god and the loser is an unperson at his mercy.

When he envisioned such things, George Orwell wrote of a totalitarian future in which a jackboot would be stamping on the human face forever. Well, tomorrow the jackboot will be available at the Air Canada Centre and on WWE pay-per-view.

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