Mummers' Theatre Changed Yearly, Never Stayed Same

Lewis Prosser makes enormous wicker costumes and calls himself an absurdist basket-maker, borrowing from mummers' plays—those rowdy masked performances that happened on street corners along the Wales-England border for centuries.

He's studied the archive, learned the traditions, built the pieces. The premise seems straightforward. Folk culture is worth saving, materials are worth respecting, and traditions are worth reviving.

But the argument contains an unexamined claim that splits the entire folk performance world. It assumes folk traditions exist as stable objects—recoverable, documentable, things you can study in a 1950s fieldwork archive and then faithfully recreate. This is false.

Mummers' theatre was never stable. It changed yearly by village, by performer, by what materials were available and what the audience would tolerate—a mummers' play in 1923 Herefordshire was not the same as one in 1967. The form thrived because it was adaptive. Performers treated tradition as a living conversation with their specific moment, not as a script to be executed correctly. When folklorists like E.

What they recorded was a snapshot. What they created—through the act of recording—was an illusion of stability.

What they recorded was a snapshot. What they created—through the act of recording—was an illusion of stability. This distinction matters because it changes what revival actually means. When Prosser builds wicker costumes and performs them, is he restoring something that was murdered by industrialization and cultural forgetting, or is he inventing something new and calling it recovery to avoid the vulnerability of admitting that's what artists do?

The English morris dancing revival of the twentieth century ran into this exact problem. Purists studied the archived versions and performed them as historical fact. Experimentalists took the same traditions and changed them—sometimes adding women to all-male sides, sometimes reworking the music entirely. Both claimed authenticity. Both were right and both were lying.

What would it mean to build wicker costumes for a performance tradition if you accepted that you weren't preserving anything? That you were making something that didn't exist before, using language and materials borrowed from something that doesn't exist anymore?