Week 6 — Burton Taylor Studio — 9:30–10:30pm
https://www.oxfordplayhouse.com/events/the-harrowing-of-hell
Week 7 — The Crypt of St Peter in the East — 8:00–9:00pm
www.ticketsource.com/theharrowingofhell
£8 / £6 students
A new 2026 adaptation of the medieval Harrowing of Hell narrative, created from English mystery plays (York Cycle, Towneley Plays, Ludus Coventriae, Chester Cycle) and rewritten into contemporary English.
For 4000 years, Satan has ruled Hell and guarded the souls of the dead. After the Crucifixion, Christ descends into Hell to reclaim them and dismantle the kingdom Satan built.
The play opens in an exhausted, decaying Hell where Satan, far from triumphant, has become the prisoner of his own creation, haunted by the voices, smells, and bodies of the souls who have been condemned. A narrator forces both the audience and Satan to witness the spectacle of his downfall, imposing upon him the slow collapse and reconfiguration of his kingdom.
Around him, demons transform suffering into ritual. Their violent games perpetually reenact a grotesque mechanism. Hell becomes an obsessive choreography in which exhausted bodies repeat the same gestures endlessly, trapped within laws that even Satan no longer fully controls. Meanwhile, Adam and Eve drift between terror, dependence, and tenderness toward the very being who imprisons them.
As an unknown presence begins to press against the walls of Hell, the fragile balance of this decaying world starts to fracture. Christ arrives not as a merciful redeemer, but as a violent intrusion: abandoned by both God and mankind, he descends to reclaim what he believes is rightfully his, tearing apart the miserable order in which these souls have painfully learned to survive.
Yet what Christ offers is far from simple salvation. The inhabitants of Hell no longer know how to imagine life outside the systems that have shaped them. Adam and Eve hesitate to leave Satan behind, even as they continue to suffer under his power.
The play asks whether escape from Hell truly means submission, or whether salvation itself can become another form of violence. The Harrowing of Hell.26 is a piece about domination, exhaustion, attachment, and the terrifying uncertainty of liberation itself.
Warning: Contains religious (Christian) themes, elements of irreverence, and depictions of psychological distress
