These days it seems like noone writes scripts for new movies - old movies get redone, popular books get dramatized and the same old ideas get rehashed.

Apparently this is not a new phenomenon and back in the Middle Ages, when the drama shows back into the Western cannon, it shows up in two forms: as original plays and as book adaptations. And being the Middle Ages, the book that gets adapted is of course the Bible. These adaptations usually started with the Creation and moved up, producing a cycle of plays which cover (and explain) most of the important actions in the Bible. They were called mystery plays -- some use miracle plays as a name but that has a slightly different meaning in the strict sense of the word. Noone knows how many of those cycles existed - only 4 (or 5) survived - but it is possible and very likely that there were a lot more of these - at least 127 town on the British Isles are known to have produced plays and it is almost impossible for the existing 4 (or 5) cycles to have been everywhere, not that early in the history anyway (14th-15th century).

This play is from the Chester cycle, a 24-25 (depends on your source) plays cycle from the late 14th/early 15th century. The play is also called "The Watter Leaders and the Drawers of Dee Playe".

Written in verse, it is a fairly straight forward adaptation of the Noah story - from the first moment God talked to him about it to the end of the Great Flood. It is a story everyone knows - regardless of your religious affiliations and there are no surprises in it. I am not planning to chasing and reading the complete cycle (for now) but it was interesting to see how drama returned to the Western world.