Death and the Ploughman
The demise of his beloved wife fuels the ploughman with such a deep rage and grief that he questions Death, demanding justice for the wrong that has been done. Death, dapper and polite, stands in stark contrast to the emotional ploughman but is eventually shaken by the latter’s persistence and rejection of death’s reasonableness. The deus ex machina proclaims honour to the ploughman and victory to Death.
Death and the Ploughman was written in the context of the death of the author’s wife and after the Black Death had exacted a heavy toll on Europe. It is both a personal cry of anguish and a questioning of man’s place in the larger scheme of things.
As the translator Michael West acknowledges, “it is not, strictly speaking, a play.” Staging it proves to be a daunting challenge. The choreographed movements of the actors prevent the drama from lapsing into stasis but prove to be distracting at times. The decision not to have an interval was the right one but it did not make the heavy-going play any easier to absorb. The arguments made are not exactly new to us but provide an illuminating look at one man’s struggle with faith and life and death at the turn of the 15th century.