Performances of Mark's Gospel

I have sometimes heard people talking about amazing one-man (and it usually is a man) shows performing Mark's Gospel.  I am currently working on a presentation about Mark's Gospel in the digital age for the SBL International and I began to wonder if there were any great one-person presentations of Mark's Gospel on Youtube.  And there are a few.  They vary greatly in quality and degree of irritation and some, it has to be said, are a little acTORish, but here are a few that I have found interesting.

My favourite is currently this version in German by Eric Wehrlin.  It's nicely produced and has good live intro-music and outro-credits too:

This one is by Max McLean and I have to say that he sounds terribly like Tom Baker (Doctor Who), so if you want to hear Mark's Gospel performed by the fourth doctor, this is the one for you:





It is indexed on Youtube by chapter, and the above is the playlist linking all sixteen chapters.  The translation appears to be the NIV, but with some of McLean's little edits.  One of the advantages of this version is that it introduces nice maps on screen whenever necessary, and we get the odd sound effect. He introduces some humour into the performance in such a way that surprising pieces end up seeming amusing, which of course is one of the advantages of a live performance.  I must admit that this one is really growing on me.  There is more on its own website, Mark's Gospel on Stage with Max McLean.

There are some interesting issues with live performances that may help us to think through the performance of texts in antiquity.  For one thing, I was struck how in both Wehrlin's and McLean's performances, Mark's broken sentence at Mark 2.10 ("but in order that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins . . . ."), often said by Biblical scholars to be somewhat colloquial, works very well.

Similarly, one has to make a judgement about the ending of Mark.  In both performances, the actors also perform the longer ending.  I suppose the Biblical scholars will all balk at this, so ingrained is it that Mark finishes at 16.8, but actually, the relatively unfamiliarity of Mark 16.9-20 gives each performance a strange freshness.

There are other performances available on Youtube, some much less professional than these two, and there are clips of others.  One that may be of interest is Whitney Shiner, who is an actual Biblical scholar, here filmed performing Mark 7.  This is not a professional video, but it gives an idea of his performance including, once again, the use of humour.




It looks like he is in the classroom, but there is no further information about the performance here.  I once heard Shiner performing pieces of Mark 15 at the SBL Annual Meeting.  I am curious as to whether he has ever done a performance of the whole thing.

Update (12.45pm): More! Thanks to Matthew Montonini for drawing my attention to several clips of Tom Boomershine performing Mark, all the more interesting since he is my respondent at the SBL International Meeting at St Andrews.  Perhaps I could ask him to perform a piece for me at the session!

This piece is an audience recording of his performance of part of Mark's Passion Narrative in Greek as well as in translation.  Boomershine contextualizes the performance with some comments about Mark's composition too, which contrasts somewhat with the less scholarly introduction to Max McLean's show above:




And although there is not yet a complete recitation of Mark's Gospel by Boomershine on Youtube, there are several nicely-produced clips (but don't be put off by Boomershine's quite extraordinary shirt, which you do eventually get used to).  This clip is Mark 15.1-15:




As far as I can see, no one has yet put together a playlist of all the clips. If anyone feels like doing that, and would like to let me know, I'd be really grateful.  The other clips are: Mark 3.31-35, Mark 7.1-23, Mark 13.3-17, Mark 14.3-9, Mark 14.53-65.  There are some clips from a different performance and this time Boomershine is more conventionally dressed:





For these, see also Mark 1.9-15, Mark 2.1-14, Mark 8.13-21 and Mark 10.1-12.

Judging from the number of views these clips have had (in the teens for some of them), very few people know about this resource.  In some ways it is not surprising given the lack of metadata for each video -- you'd have to know to search for Boomershine.  Searches on things like "Mark as story" or "performances of Mark" or "Mark one man show" and so on would not turn these up.  Perhaps this blog post can go some way towards changing that.

Update (1.46pm): Thanks to three minute theologian (comments) who reminded me of Alex McCowen's famous performance of Mark's Gospel.  There are some low-quality mp4s of the performance on Youtube.