“I hear the nun is writing once again.”
There, in one line, is the entire essence of Helen Edmundson’s play. It
contains the biographical subject: 17th-century Mexican nun, poet and
playwright Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. It contains the linguistic form:
the published playscript is not laid out in verse, but the iambs toll
with sonorous regularity throughout, with many a perfect pentameter
such as this one. Above all it contains the theme of the evening:
Sister Juana’s struggle with the church authorities who disliked her
for writing secular material but principally for being an intelligent,
articulate woman. Of course, there is more to it: some three hours
more, measuring by volume, but not really so much more, to go by weight.
The work has a number of strikes against it. Most obviously, it is far
too late to capitalise on the success of the RSC’s staging of Sor
Juana’s
House Of Desires in
its Spanish Golden Age season, for that was in 2004-5. Without this
hook, it needs to succeed on its own terms. Alas, it falls squarely
into the worthy genre of “independent woman squashed by the patriarchy”
dramas… and there is perhaps no more definitive patriarchy than the
Catholic Church, especially in Spain (or rather, “New Spain”, as Mexico
was then called) during the Inquisition. Sister Juana’s innocent novice
niece is played for a pawn in the power-tussle between state and
church; she herself is betrayed by a temporising bishop who switches
sides to ally himself with his puritanical, ice-blooded archbishop
superior. And so on.
There is intelligence aplenty in the play, but it is all displayed
statically rather than brought to life; Sister Juana’s clever
theological rebuttal of a sermon of the archbishop’s has none of the
sense of high stakes that, for instance, ran through David Edgar’s play
about the King James Bible,
Written
On The Heart, on this stage just a few months ago. Director
Nancy Meckler gives things a coherent but formal staging, devoid of the
exuberance she brought to
House Of
Desires. What should be the climactic confrontation between nun
and archbishop (who, unsubtly, will not even look at her) is in fact
the least organic, most predictable part of the evening. Catherine
McCormack, Stephen Boxer, Geoffrey Beevers, Raymond Coulthard and Dona
Croll are among the actors giving more than the play deserves.
Written for the Financial
Times.