David
Edgar has an enduring preoccupation with the ways language channels and
even defines thought: if we do not have access to a description of
something, then how can we properly include it in our discourse?
Several times his plays have shown groups of people discussing in
minute detail how to word a particular document such as a peace treaty.
In this new Royal Shakespeare Company commission, the document in
question is the King James Bible. With Protestantism 400 years ago
between the rock of Catholicism and the hard place of Puritanism,
individual words in the Bible mattered: “repentance” or the Romish
“penance”, “church” or the more radical “congregation”? (There were
also less fraught disputes, such as between “delectable” and “very
pleasant”.)
For those of us fascinated by words and their uses, this matter is in itself fairly compelling. However, in all conscience (
there’s
a religious turn of phrase), Edgar does not always animate the human
stories behind such matters. Here, the first and last of the four
scenes involve a meeting in 1610 between a number of bishops and
scholars to iron out some final textual cruces (another religiously
charged term); scene two flashes back three-quarters of a century to
the night before the execution of William Tyndale, the translator of
the first and clandestine English translation of the New Testament; in
scene three, a Yorkshire parish in the 1580s is visited by a kind of
Anglican inquisition, showing that the 1568 “Bishops’ Bible” in English
has already become an instrument of authority. Before the final 1610
meeting, Tyndale’s shade visits Bishop Lancelot Andrewes to facilitate
Edgar in some historical exposition and the underlining of the play’s
vision, which is that of good and devout men trying to reconcile
spiritual and temporal imperatives: what must be written on the heart
is that “only love and mercy truly comprehend the law”.
Oliver
Ford Davies is excellent as Andrewes, weighing his words and ideas
scrupulously yet also capable of passion when contending with Stephen
Boxer’s Tyndale, a man driven by inner fire. Gregory Doran’s production
is both fluent and sedulous, but like Edgar’s script cannot quite place
the beating heart of the play in a living breast. Yet in the end, isn’t
all theatre a kind of theological metaphor? For above there is a great
light, and below only darkness and gnashing of teeth.
Written for the Financial
Times.