The Lightning Play - Almeida Theatre

HALLOWEEN
alloween is the great survivor among
British seasonal festivals. Older than
Valentine’s Day, Bonfire Night, and even
Christmas, it has survived regular attempts at
reform or abolition, and managed to reinvent
itself numerous times.
Its most recent incarnation –
characterised by a sudden interest in
pumpkins, visits from trick-ortreating
infants, and a brief flowering
of bizarre consumer products in the
supermarkets – is largely an
importation from the United States.
But the modern Halloween
represents no more than the grafting
of a new stem onto a plant with deep
British roots. Halloween has been
able to adapt and survive because it
“Halloween has been able to adapt and survive
because it is one of very few occasions when issues
around death, loss, and the fragility of ordinary
human society are collectively confronted”
MOST LIGHTNING
STRIKES AVERAGE
2 TO 3 MILES
IN LENGTH
is one of very few occasions when
issues around death, loss, and the
fragility of ordinary human society
are collectively confronted, and when
usually suppressed fears are brought
into the open. Whatever else has
changed down the centuries, death
and loss are the great constants of
human culture.
Halloween’s origins are obscure, but
stretch back to pre-Christian times.
The ancient Celtic peoples celebrated
a major festival, Samhain, at the
beginning of November each year.
We know few details about this
festivity, but it seems clear that
Samhain was designed to mark the
turn of the seasons, to celebrate the
end of the agricultural year and the
coming of winter. It seems also to
have involved the ritual lighting of
fires, in defiance of the onset of the
months of darkness.
The fires may have had a specifically
protective purpose, for Samhain was
an evident time of transition and
change. As anthropologists of
different human cultures have long
pointed out, such boundary or
‘liminal’ moments are often felt to be
fraught with potential danger,
occasions when the forces of the
unseen spiritual world threaten to
break into the known material one.
Well into the nineteenth century,
ON AVERAGE
LIGHTNING
STRIKES THE
EARTH ABOUT
100 TIMES
EVERY SECOND