There was no dampening of enthusiasm even when everything else was getting damp beneath an authentically English sky — and even when this particular performance of Kynren was a preview, a trial run ahead of the first night proper on July 27.
The Archers, as they call the volunteers who make this extraordinary pageant happen, were out in force, close to 1,000 of them, itching to put into practice what they’ve been taught over many weeks.
Sometimes it can seem as if every one of them is lining the route to the carpark and turnstiles armed with a smile.
Even on this wet evening, the volunteer greeters in their red tops were out in force, making each new arrival feel the most wanted and welcome visitor to any event ever.
Behind the scenes, the performers were waiting to play their part as Vikings, monks, Cavaliers, roundheads, miners, farmers or knights in armour — whatever this colourful flash through history demanded of them.
The animals — about 150 of them including sheep, goats, geese, cattle, donkeys and beautiful grey horses — were also, we were told, raring to go.
Media outlets have been supplied with regular progress reports.
Cosmo, a magnificent grey draught horse, 18.3 hands high, had ‘taken to his carriage driving responsibilities exceptionally well’, Laurie Robinson, Kynren director of cavalry and estates, assured us.
“He truly is an exceptional horse and we feel very lucky to have him in our team.”
Cosmo was to feature in some of the processions and in a Viking attack on a village where a fisherwoman gets kidnapped.
Then there were the scene-stealing geese who live all year round on the Kynren site and pay for their keep by waddling across the arena at a key moment during each performance.
According to Laurie, these geese have been taking part in Tuesday night training sessions with the cast who’ve been ‘taught to understand the body language of the geese and how their own body language affects the geese and their movement’.
All I can say is that any form of live entertainment reliant on the body language of geese deserves all the applause it gets. American actor WC Fields — ‘Never work with children or animals’ — would have had kittens.
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Before the show began there was a chance to visit the Viking Village, a new attraction offering the chance to venture nervously back in time to see how these fearsome folk lived.
The village features a blacksmith’s forge, cottages, a cookhouse and people looking startlingly authentic engaged in various Viking crafts.
But outside one home a no-holds-barred Viking ‘domestic’ seemed to be in progress, male and female armed to the teeth and going at each other hammer and tongs.
It’s amazing how ferocious people from Bishop Auckland can look when sporting swords, shields and bushy beards… and it’s tempting to add ‘and that’s just the women!’.
Kynren first took place on its seven-and-a-half-acre site below Auckland Castle in 2016, with shows throughout that inaugural summer season for audiences up to 8,000-strong.
As with much else in the town, it was philanthropist Jonathan Ruffer who made it happen and established the charity that would run it, 11Arches, which takes its name from the Newton Cap Viaduct close by.
Settled a little soggily in our seats for Saturday’s performance, the new 11Arches CEO, Anna Warnecke, took the microphone.
“Having been involved since the beginning, I feel like the luckiest person in the world to have been given the opportunity to look after Kynren and be the custodian of it,” she said.
“The Archers have worked their socks off over the winter months to welcome you to Kynren 2024.”
And with that she was off to join the cavalry, Anna being an experienced and accomplished horsewoman.
This, I’m pretty sure, was my fourth experience of Kynren and I was no less impressed than the person sitting next to me who was seeing it for the first time and was entranced.
I know there are historians who might quibble, querying whether King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table stand up to academic scrutiny or wondering about the First World War confined to a letter home and a football match.
But the sheer spectacle gets me every time, along with the soundtrack and the amplified commentary, Kevin Whately kicking it off with John o’ Gaunt’s speech from Shakespeare’s Richard II — ‘This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England…’
The geese performed perfectly on the night, body language registering willing compliance, no-one fell off a horse, King Harold duly took an arrow in the eye, the miners’ hymn Gresford no doubt put a tear in plenty of other eyes and Winston Churchill won the war.
And then there was the tremendous concluding firework display lighting up the sky over a cast of 1,000.
Let me put it this way, Kynren (the name mimicking the Anglo-Saxon word for ‘family’) is something you should probably see at least once — and if there’s water dripping down the back of your neck, I reckon you won’t even feel it.
Kynren: An Epic Tale of England is to be performed on Saturday, July 27 and thereafter for seven more successive Saturdays, concluding on September 14.
You can book tickets via the Kynren website.
