YORK’S City Screen cinema is backing the York Mystery Plays by showing short trailers produced by local company Fresh Label to publicise the Plays before main film screenings.

The cinema in Coney Street is also planning to show The Gospel Of Us, a Port Talbot Passion film starring Martin Sheen, who plays a Christ-like figure in a town overrun by authoritarian forces, at 3pm on Sunday, August 5.

Cinema marketing manager Dave Taylor said it had long planned to programme something interesting to coincide with the Plays, which are being staged in the Museum Gardens throughout August.

He said he had arranged the timing of the Gospel of Us screening so that anyone wanting to make a day of it could attend both this and a Plays performance.

• Actor Simon Ward who played Christ in the York Mystery Plays in 1984 has died, aged 70. In 1974, Ward was cast as the author and veterinarian, James Herriot, in the original film adaptation of All Creatures Great and Small