Caryl Churchill’s 1976 dramatic
collage-portrait of the Levellers, Diggers, Ranters and other
millenarian radicals of the English Civil War period implicitly
suggests correspondences with its own time, as does any revival. For
instance, the account of the 1647 Putney Debates between disparate
elements in Cromwell’s New Model Army may today elicit flip
observations about the difficulties of coalition government. But this
scene illustrates much more, such as the frequency with which reforms
proposed in opposition are jettisoned in government, and the
hyperbolical argument which equates changing one thing with overturning
the entire established order (as Henry Ireton argued that abolishing
the property qualification on voting would effectively abolish the
concept of property).
Churchill shows us an age of almost unbelievable fluidity in the social
order: thousands believed that the second coming of Christ was at hand
and that it was their pressing duty to bring about the kingdom of
heaven on earth. In particular, many Ranters shared the notions of the
earlier Brethren of the Free Spirit, that since God was in all things
then they, being themselves divine, could not sin. This is shown in the
play’s other lengthy scene, although director Polly Findlay makes of it
almost as much of a debate as Putney, with little sense of the dynamism
and licence of such beliefs. At this point things may drag, as they
certainly did on the press night which was by then running half an hour
behind schedule.
Each of the six performers plays a variety of roles, not limited by
sex: Michelle Terry and Helena Lymbery each excel in the Putney
sequence, as Ireton and one of the Leveller agitators respectively.
Jamie Ballard also brings a conviction and intensity to his range of
characters. (One pedantic point: the hypercorrection of voicing the “i”
in “Parliament” is annoying at the best of times, but more so when the
person mispronouncing it is supposed to be Parliament’s champion,
Oliver Cromwell: a rare lapse in excellence for Kobna Holdbrook-Smith.)
In the end, the play reminds us sombrely that such moments of potential
pass: they either come to nothing in the first place, or the old order
is soon restored. As Pete Townshend put it in a later episode of
comparable apparent flux, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
Written for the Financial
Times.