Oberammagau Passion Play 2022

 

 

Visiting the famous Passion Play at Oberammergau is, I should imagine, on numerous people’s bucket lists. I have wanted to see the production since I first read of the play and the vow that inspired it in my teens. The play has been performed at (usually) ten year intervals since 1634; the performance now habitually falls on years ending in 0, although the 2020 production has been delayed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Three years after I’d booked a trip to see it, I witnessed the play on Thursday 14 July, 2022. The performance takes place in an enormous auditorium seating just short of 5000 people, with the audience covered but the stage open to the sky (with the Alps in the background). The cast, musicians, singers and crew are entirely drawn from the village, and in production years the performances last from May to early October. A good short read about the play is A Pilgrim's Guide to Oberammergau and its Passion Play by Raymond Goodburn (Pilgrim Book Services, 2019) which provides a history of the play and an account of the logistics of the production.

 

The history of the play is not without its controversies, most specifically the virulent anti-Semitism in the text, which caused a certain audience member named Adolf Hitler to proclaim that the play’s continued production was vital, as it "revealed the muck and mire of Jewry." The same text that Hitler witnessed continued in performance until the first production of the 21^st century, in 2000. The play as now performed is mostly by director Christian Stückl, freely adapted from medieval Mystery Play material and subsequent 19^th Century revisions by Othmar Weis and J. A. Daisenberger. The Stückl play is a wordy and theologically dense piece which dramatises the Passion story as one of inter-faith conflict, with Jesus the reforming Jew coming into conflict with the ritualistic, empty and hypocritical state of his Jewish religion as propagated by the High Priest Caiaphas and his allies in the Sanhedrin. There are several scenes which almost entirely consist of arguments between the conservative faction, led by Caiaphas, and the supporters of Jesus, led by Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. Given that the play is performed in German and without any English surtitles, this is a challenging watch for a non-German speaker (you can follow the text in a printed booklet), but even for those fluent in German, the play offers no concessions to contemporary dramaturgy – it reminds me most strongly of 18^th and 19^th century writers such as Schiller, Shaw (albeit without the humour), or the Ibsen of Emperor and Galilean. Despite this tendency to verbosity, the play communicates most effectively through visual statements – we see Jesus the servant of his fellows washing their feet, and Caiaphas being borne on a throne by servants. Their contrasting attitudes to leadership and serving their communities is thus simply and eloquently staged.

 

The director states in the programme that we can no longer rely on audiences to be familiar with the teachings of Jesus (although this presupposes a younger audience than was in evidence at the performance I attended). Despite beginning with the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem on a donkey to adoring crowds, much of the first part of the five hour play is taken by Jesus repeating elements of his sermons and disputations from earlier episodes in the gospel (including the prevented stoning of the woman taken in adultery and the Magdalene bathing him with expensive balm). This Jesus is strongly on the side of social justice, pacifism, mutual love and respect. His criticisms of the High Priest and his cronies are based in their failure to help the people or offer good role models. There is some ambiguity in the motivations of Caiaphas and his associates: they claim that they are preventing Jesus from stirring up social unrest and are therefore protecting the people from Roman retaliatory violence (we see Pilate warning them re Jesus), yet they seem personally stung by Jesus critique of them, and therefore his arrest and persecution is an act of spiteful revenge. The portrait of the anti-Jesus majority of the Sanhedrin is carefully handled, to prevent any descent into the kind of medieval caricatures that Durer depicted so viscerally in his Jesus Among the Doctors (1506). Nevertheless, Annas and others are pretty repellent and unforgiving characters. It is clear that Stückl keeps emphasising Jesus and his companion’s Jewishness as a counterbalance; the infamous blood curse – traditionally shouted as the crowd is baying for the release Barabbas and the crucifixion of Christ – is excised, and it’s clear that there is a large Jewish minority in the crowd that believes Jesus to be innocent and wants him freed. Unfortunately, the bad elements outnumber the decent, and who could deny the simple truth of this ever-recurring tendency of the honest to be outnumbered in the popular voice by the barbarous. In the same way, the argument between a formal ritualisation of religion/conviction in the public performance of virtue by a wealthy elite, and the interiorisation of godliness/goodness by those with less power, which manifests in works of empathy and charity, is an eternally reoccurring tendency, occurring today for people of all creeds and nations, those with formal religions or those with ideologies which have replaced religion in the public sphere of our contemporary societies.

 

If Caiaphas and his crew are dubious in their motivations, the play portrays Judas as much more conflicted. He spends the early part of the play arguing with Jesus about the best way to propagate the message and the efficacy of armed rebellion. His betrayal of Jesus is shown to be based in a naïve belief that if he brings Caiaphas and Jesus together for a chat, Jesus may bring the sceptics in the Sanhedrin around. Of course, he soon discovers that Caiaphas has no interest in listening and is actively plotting Jesus’ death. This sends Judas into a spiral of self-recrimination and despair, disgusted that the Sanhedrin has given him money for his traitorous kiss, and unable to turn back time or persuade the priests to release Jesus. Judas’ realisation of what he has done and his inability to forgive himself for it is dramatized in a sequence of scenes alongside Peter’s three denials. The contrast between Judas committing suicide because he cannot forgive himself and Peter’s accepting that Jesus has forgiven him for his weakness is emphasised in a strong piece of dramatic structuring. Judas and Peter’s betrayals are of a type together, yet one finds forgiveness and the other cannot.

 

Because Jesus repeats the greatest hits of His ministry in the first part, He has rather more dialogue than He otherwise might in a Passion. There’s also a certain amount of character development – He realises in an early scene that He is going to die in Jerusalem, and confronts the full horror of it in His Gethsemane prayer. In the prayer, He acknowledges that His fate was written before the world began; He is comforted in Gethsemane by the ministrations of an angel (portrayed as a young man without any supernatural attributes). In this way, we feel Jesus’s story as both a very human one – He is assenting to giving up His life – but also the story of a being who is more than human. He clearly asserts to Caiaphas that He is the Messiah, but Nicodemus interprets His supposed blasphemies about being the Son of God by reminding the accusers that all of them refer to God as a father. For me, the story of someone who makes the monumental decision to undergo trial and death, then who finds some solidity within Himself to bear the agony, was the strongest element of the play. I wondered what was going on in His mind as he went through the trials and the Stations of the Cross; as the play offered no interior dialogues for Jesus here, we are left to imagine.

 

The play’s linear narrative – from the entry into Jerusalem to the discovery of the empty tomb by Mary Magdalene – is punctuated by oratorio-like musical interludes (reminiscent of Bach’s Passions), written in the nineteenth century by Rochus Dedler and revised a number of times since. These are beautiful and powerfully performed by the chorus and soloists; the soprano solo before the Gethsemane scene is particularly exquisite. The hybrid of dramatic play and oratorio is an unusual form, for which I cannot think of any equivalent. The oratorio sections also feature numerous tableaux of Old Testament episodes – the expulsion from Eden, Job mocked, the parting of the red sea, Abraham and Isaac, the raising of the brazen serpent – which speak in relation to the following Passion sequence of scenes. In this way, the play finds a theatrical equivalent to the typographical elements of the Gospels – as if Jesus’s Passion were being underlined as a version of numerous Jewish myths, their ultimate expression in time and space and history. A real, historical man consciously takes upon Himself the mantle of the legend. 

 

The stage is made up of classical columns, emphasising that the life and death of Jesus took place within the setting of classical antiquity, yet also offered a challenge to those who build the columns and pediments, as well as those who collaborate or make deals with the tyrants. It feels significant that the top of the stage was open to the sky – offering a metaphorical escape. We never see the risen Jesus, but the missing roof proposes a possibility.

 

There’s a lot to consider in the village’s vow to continually perform this man’s trial and death. It is the ultimate example of community theatre – about 2500 of the village’s 5000 inhabitants are involved. The production is an enormous spectacle – the entry into Jerusalem, the driving of the merchants from the temple, the crowd crying for the release of Barabbas, the crucifixion are all immense scenes, stretching across the stage as a living widescreen experience. We chatted to a few of the actors – our waiter in the inn before the play was a performer, and we met Judas, Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea and Sanhedrin lawyer Nathaniel as they lounged on the steps outside the theatre at the break. The standard of performance is very high and the concentration is spellbindingly held; the phenomenon gives the lie to the false dichotomy of the amateur and professional. In this way, it is a dramatization of a central tenet of the Gospel – that we all carry a potential within us to present the image of God…

 

 

Henry VI, Shakespeare's primer in History

Shakespeare's Globe are currently offering audiences the relatively rare opportunity to see all of Shakespeare's Henry VI plays over one day, either at the Globe itself or on tour (including some Wars of the Roses battlefields). The plays add up to an extraordinary theatrical experience, being a kind of primer to History through Shakespeare's eyes. Shakespeare later returned to History in his Henry IV and Roman plays which are more sophisticated in terms of structure, language and character. Yet there is something raw and elemental about the Henry VI plays which makes me wish that they were better known and performed more often. A full day contemplating an Elizabethan contemplation of English History is a day well spent.

It is probable that what is now known as Henry VI Part 1 is the latest of the plays, first performed after the success of Parts 2 and 3. The play isn't really about the Wars of the Roses, being what we'd now term a prequel. The play's main focus is on the loss of France by the English nobility, as Henry V's victory at Agincourt is undone by an insurgency led by the French Dauphin and other nobles, assisted mightily by a woman whom we now know as Saint Joan of Arc but in Shakespeare's time was considered by the English as a witch and called Joan La Pucelle. The French are given a run for their money by the occupying English Army led by Lord Talbot. This French story is interspersed with scenes showing the beginning rumbles of York's rebellion, what was to become the Wars of the Roses back in England.

Talbot is the most striking character in Part 1. He is a kind of archetype of the loyal soldier, completely brilliant on the battlefield, absolutely sure-footed tactically but ultimately betrayed by his superiors in the English Army, whose squabbles lead to him being denied reinforcements in a key battle (Castillon) and the ensuing loss of his life (alongside his son, John). Shakespeare (and his collaborators) take some liberties with the actual history in this portrait but this allows them to create a rich and resonant character; Talbot is not very different from the contemporary British soldier in Iraq who loses his life because he was denied the proper equipment by slippery politicians who have their own concerns back home. Of course, Talbot does not question the war itself. In Talbot's brave, forlorn death we see (when the plays are performed in historical sequence) Shakespeare's History claiming its first victim. A man who lives by the sword dies by the sword, whatever the morality of the battle or sense of patriotic duty he is performing under, Talbot's reward is death. It is a death which involves the extinguishing of the life of another member of his family, whose demise makes Talbot's all the more personally painful. Howard Barker says ""...the experience of history is an experience of pain; the words are interchangeable" and the Henry VI plays are very much a pageant of pain.

The England-set scenes in Henry VI Part 1 snake around the French scenes, sowing seeds for the later civil war. The important thing here is that those seeds have been planted before the action happens, with the deposition of Richard II and the usurpation of the throne by Henry Bolingbroke (Henry IV); Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York discovers that he has a legitimate claim to the throne, albeit by such a tortuous lineage that the explanation of it brought floods of laughter from the Globe audience. More than one critic has linked these plays with Aeschylus' Oresteia and there is a strong sense in which they, like much of Greek tragedy, show the workings of fate and the payment for past sins, which might lay dormant but fester until they erupt. There is a warning here – don't let anybody think they've got away with anything, as Time working through History continually brings the past to knock on the present's doors. And, Shakespeare being as Biblical an author as he was Greek, we see the sins of the fathers visited on future generations.

There were some unfortunate cuts in the Globe's productions, understandable in practical terms but still losing some of the point of the play. An early scene (Part 1 Act 2, Scene 3) featuring the Countess of Auvergne attempting to trap Lord Talbot through means of sorcery and enchantment. In itself, it adds little to the onward motion of the narrative – but taken together with Joan's use of sorcery to battle the English and Margaret of Anjou (albeit unwittingly) enchanting the Earl of Suffolk towards the end, there is a strong sense that underneath the use of force is an attempt to use dark and irrational forces (be they devilish or simply of the body and beauty) to influence the game. It is as if Shakespeare is acknowledging that men, power and weapons are not all that there is. This theme continues throughout the trilogy, with the downfall of the Duchess of Gloucester in Part 2, the evolution of Margaret of Anjou into a veritable Deborah of the Lancastrian side throughout to the prolongation of the War of the Roses caused by Edward IV's marriage to Lady Grey in Part 3. Desire and seduction have their role to play in History but in the Henry VI plays, desire is always dragged tomb-wards by events.

The Globe programme makes much of the fact that the plays were not written as a sequence and their titles were not, initially, Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3. Only Part 1 originally had that King's name in it's title (Harry the Sixth), ironically I presume given the play is largely about the loss of the lands the more popular Harry the fifth won. Henry VI barely appears in Part 1, and when he does he is a callow youth - yet his character is nicely set up: he prefers books and study to public life, even shrinking initially at the idea he has to marry someone. Some read the plays as a dire warning against the centre of power being weak and vacillating but Henry seems to me to be more an emblem of a sensitive human being caught in History's web; History is unsparing even of those who don't take up the sword, and sometimes a man's birth drags him onto History's field of horror. 

Part 1 is very much a play with a central story (the battles in France) with a sub-plot (the enmity between the Houses of Lancaster and York) snaking through it. Part 2 (originally The First part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster) is much more a play of two halves. In the first three Acts (The Globe wisely has Part 2's interval at the close of Act Three), we see mostly men of influence interacting in interiors. These are very much scenes set in the corridors of power and much of the action is through talk; yet violence is an ever-present subtext of the talk and the first half of the play ends with the bringing down of the King's Protector, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. Alongside Talbot, Gloucester is about the only character in the plays who offers anything like a positive image of a statesman. Early in Part 2, Gloucester is tempted by his Lady Macbeth-lite wife to usurp the throne, he being the next in line for the Lancastrian claim after Henry VI. He refuses to countenance this and we see that he, like Talbot, is a man for whom duty is more important than personal ambition. It is telling that, in the three plays as a historical sequence, the first major characters on the English side to be brought down to death are Talbot and Gloucester, the only two political animals who have duty as a spur. Shakespeare's monster History devours those most likely to offer loyalty and stability first, in order to open up its chaotic mouth. Yet is Gloucester good? In a scene cut from the Globe production, he has a couple of con-artist paupers flogged soundly – the kind of Shakespearean scene which is likely to give a left-liberal audience qualms. Shakespeare doesn't here question have anyone question the rightness of such rough justice (as Lear does in his mad scenes) and so the scene stands as an emblem of good social justice which potentially undermines itself to some audiences. The political Shakespeare of the Henry VI plays is, as far as I can see, a social conservative who extols patriotic duty, the strong arm of the law, strong and non-vacillating government.

Once Gloucester is out of the way, the contest for the throne begins in earnest and things fall apart. The consequences of the alliances and disagreements and decisions in the corridors of power are seen in the blood spilled in the open air of public spaces. The second half of Part 2 is, in contrast to the first's interiors, almost all exterior scenes of riot and battle. First, York prompts Jack Cade's rebellion (an Elizabethan conspiracy theory, if there ever was one) and, that being put down, the first battle of the Wars of the Roses takes place. It is worth pausing over Cade's rebellion a moment. Shakespeare is clearly not in sympathy with the revolt. Cade the puppet of people more powerful and educated than himself; once he gets power over other human beings, he immediately begins arbitrary executions, show-trials and a cultural year zero policy. Although some of Cade's commands are greeted by an audience with glee ("let's kill all the lawyers"), this is a pretty dispiriting portrait of revolutionary energy; I doubt Shakespeare would have been surprised by the 20th Century's Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot, nor stored up much hope in the recent "Arab Spring". Revolt and revolution is, through Shakespeare's eyes, the mania of the mob; Cade is a thuggish, murderous, vainglorious vanguard. Anyone with hopes of human progress brought about by violent means might bristle at this portrait of revolutionary energy but History offers more evidence for Shakespeare's vision than against it.

Part 2 ends with England in the grip of civil war. Part 3 (originally The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York) shows civil war as a horror show and conveyor belt of pain, each major stage figure passing towards their death. Atrocity pretty soon becomes the norm, as Margaret and Clifford for the Lancastrians summarily execute York's young son, the Earl of Rutland, during the Battle of Wakefield. The historical Rutland was 17 and older than Richard of Gloucester and George of Clarence when he died; Shakespeare makes him much younger. The killing is portrayed as a despicable act, on a par with Macbeth's murder of Macduff's children; what we would now consider a war crime. The slaughter of child Rutland sets a tone of darkness which pervades the first part of the play. In the midst of the darkness, the central scene of the first part has King Henry come centre stage and wish himself out of History, a mere "gentle swain" counting the days, months and years as he tends his sheep. Being in History is unforgiving and straight after his speech Henry is made to witness the mourning of a Son who has killed his father and a Father who has killed his son, a schematic pairing with little historical basis but which beautifully emblematizes the hellishness of the world being staged.

Just as Part 3 becomes almost unbearably painful in its impact, Shakespeare does what might be counted as the first genius coup de theatre in his career. We've already met the Duke of York's son, Richard of Gloucester, as a minor character in Part 2; intriguingly, the audience yelped with joy as soon as they saw his limping, twisted form come on stage. During Act 3 of Henry VI Part 3, Richard gives a long, Machiavellian speech outlining his future ambitions and determination to let nothing stand in the way of his own progress to the throne. There are a number of curious things about this speech. One is that it is absolutely not "set-up" in anything we previously see or hear of from Richard. He has been a loyal son of York, understandably sickened by his brother Rutland and father's killings. He is suddenly revealed as a psychopath and sociopath par excellence, a far more terrifying figure than anyone we have hitherto seen on the stage. The effect is almost as if we had seen a number of larvae wriggling in the murk of the Wars and now one suddenly bursts forth from its chrysalis as a Death's Head Hawk-Moth. Richard appears like a great eruption from History, just as the Beast bursts forth from the sea in the Book of Revelations. Richard is certainly a consequence of the chaos the civil war has caused – which is not to say that there is merely a cheap psychological point being made about a deformed and abused man who experienced the butchering of his father and brother and so becomes a monster (although that's certainly in there) but that the plays vision has it that such monsters in unstable times get the opportunity to burst forth, as night follows day.

The second intriguing thing is that the audience love Richard and his speech. Not only does Richard fulfil the needs of History, he embodies the need of the audience to have the horrors of history mediated in a way which can still be seen as entertainment. A play which continued as the first 3 Acts of Henry VI Part 3 does without Richard coming in and entertaining us would be unbearable for a popular audience. Shakespeare has to continue to the worst but, to do so, needs Richard's theatricality and showmanship to carry his audience with him (we should always remember that Shakespeare was a populist writer and he writes his plays with the crowd in mind, not a cognoscenti or school of aesthetes). Richard's speech is a perfect example of theatre doing its thing as a means of inducting an audience into areas it might not otherwise wish to go. It's no wonder that Shakespeare went on to write a play with Richard at its centre; management, audiences and his own canniness must have been begging him..

The Globe put Part 3's interval after Richard's speech and follow it with the scene where Margaret and Warwick both approach the French King Louis for support. This scene is played as farce, with Louis a camp and broad parody Frenchman. This feels right, as not only are the shifting tones of the play necessary for the attention of the audience but also History, although painful, is farcical from a certain point of view. Louis takes himself very seriously indeed and therefore we can laugh at him; Richard brings us in on the joke, and so we laugh with him.

The play runs apace to its end at the Globe after this, with Henry and Edward IV on and off the throne for each other as if on a jigsaw. The Globe cut a lot of this fluctuation in fortunes, which is again a shame, as the text has intriguing, Jarry-like elements of absurdity not emphasised when these cuts are made. Finally, the Yorkists win at Tewkesbury, killing Prince Edward of Wales in front of his Mother, Margaret of Anjou. Margaret is one of Shakespeare's greatest female characters, every bit as developed as Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra and with a longer emotional journey through the trilogy than any of them. The shy princess brought into the net of history by the Earl of Sussex has seen her husband deposed, her lover beheaded (she carries around his severed head for some of Henry VI Part 2), finally becoming the Lancastrian warrior that her husband could never be. It was she that rubbed York's nose in the blood of his child, Rutland and now she weeps to see her own child die, realising too late what humanity is and how much pain is involved in such atrocities. It is a tribute to Shakespeare's writing that, although we know Margaret's complaints are rich considering her previous antics, we still nevertheless empathise with her pain. Even better, Shakespeare lets us realise how ironic Margaret's complaints are without having another character point out this irony in on-the-nose dialogue (dramatists, learn from this).

Richard of Gloucester scoots from the Tewkesbury battlefield to murder Henry VI; the apotheosis of History meets out its revenge against the man who would escape it. Henry's killing is purely about ambition and ideology – Henry stands in the way of the Yorkist claim to the throne (and therefore Richard's aim at it) but his friends and supporters are all dead and he has zero capital with the English people. Richard's killing of Henry is the symbolic sacrifice of an innocent. In his dying breath, Henry cries "God forgive my sins, and pardon thee!" It is no coincidence that in the final scene (in lines I can't remember being in The Globe version), Richard explicitly draws comparison between himself and Judas. Shakespeare, working in a deeply Christian culture and tradition, shows History as culminating in the sacrifice of Christ.

There is of course a large dollop of Tudor ideology in the Henry VI plays. I won't say propaganda, as I don't think the Elizabethan playwrights were being consciously propagandistic, rather simply repeating the commonplace beliefs – ideologies – of their time. Henry, near the end of Part 3, lauds the young Henry Tudor (future Earl of Richmond, nemesis of Richard III and so Henry VII) and Henry VI's death as Christ suggests Henry VII's victory was a kind of Second Coming, which is problematic to say the least. Tudor England was nobody's idea of paradise and in later plays Shakespeare dramatises the problems. Despite this, there is a strong sense in which the Henry VI plays transcend the particular history they are writing about or indeed writing from and offer a vision of History itself, a terrifying vision which, if you factor in the problems of seeing the Tudors as bringing long-lasting stability, is akin to Joyce's "…nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

In the programme notes, The Globe go out of their way to emphasise that the plays were not written as and never meant to be performed as a cycle. Yet by happy serendipity and beyond all reasonable expectation, they work as perfectly well in cycle as the Oresteia or Der Ring des Nibelungen. They ought to be much more frequently performed – I'd like to see the National do the three plays as uncut as possible in the Olivier with a large cast and major actors in the major roles; one of the problems with the Globe's touring version is that, whilst it is very good indeed on its own terms, the battle and mob scenes are very sparse and the cast have to double so much that many major characters (Warwick suffers particularly) don't come across as individually as they might. The plays are, as I said at the outset, Shakespeare's primer in the problem that is History. Though one might disagree with the pessimism of the vision, World History since their writing has tended to reinforce it, as the likes of Henry VI, Talbot, Humphrey, the Richards (of York and Gloucester), Margaret, Joan La Pucelle and Jack Cade et al try to either make good in, escape from or manipulate History to their own ends and all end up drawn down into its flood, dragging whole peoples down with them.

Judith: A Parting From The Body

With respect to Field Marshal Paulus, who had done the "wrong" thing and surrendered to the Red Army at the close of the siege of Stalingrad, Adolf Hitler stated "What is life? Life is the Nation. The individual must die anyway. Beyond the life of the individual is the Nation." (Hitler, 2007) The question of whether an individual owes allegiance to something beyond themselves – their country or class or family or peer or political group – is a central question in ethics. It is also at the centre of Howard Barker's play Judith: A Parting From The Body, which is currently getting a welcome revival at the Cock Theatre. Judith posits that there is another force pulling at the individual, a force which may wrench them away from their allegiance to ideological forces and compel them to rebel; that force is desire.

Barker's subject is the assassination of the Babylonian general Holofernes by the Israelite widow Judith in his tent just before a battle which would have seen the nation of Israel massacred or enslaved. This is an Apocryphal subject, told in the Book of Judith, yet one which has been at the centre of European art  and culture for centuries: Chaucer and Dante wrote of it, Caravaggio, Artemisia  and Cranach painted it; Vivaldi composed an opera on the subject. In Barker's short play, Judith (accompanied by a servant) arrives at the tent of the general planning to kill him, only to have her plans thrown into doubt by a mutual desire which develops between the widow and the general. What does a person do when one's ideological commitments are at odds with one's desiring subjectivity?

Barker does not change the tale's end. Judith beheads Holofernes and so saves Israel. But there it also appears that in betraying her personal bodily desires for the body politic in this way, Judith has killed herself. She is paralysed after the act and only rises as a new being, one who announces that "Israel Is My Body!" (Barker, 1990) She stomps around declaring herself a god and wishing to massacre innocents. She is a walking talking price that has been paid for committing oneself ideologically against all personal considerations.

Barker does not indicate whether he thinks she has done the right or wrong thing. It is made clear, as in the original, that Holofernes death was absolutely necessary for the survival of Israel. Yet who could think that the being Judith becomes is admirable? Perhaps the choice is impossible and, one way or another, the only choice is between deaths.

The strength of Judith as a theatre event is that it shows, in one intense act and through the interaction of just three characters, the impossibility of the human situation at this extreme. Given the infinite calls of ideological commitment that pull at us all and the many times when we are expected to act against our own desiring agency's interest, Judith offers a microcosmic vision of a terrible, insurmountable  moment in which we could all find (and lose) ourselves any time now.

Bibliography

Barker, H. (2011, 02 08). Judith: A Parting From The Body. (R. Winfield-Smith, Director, C. Cusack, E. Prior, & L. Smith, Performers) Cock Tavern Theatre, London, England, United Kingdom.

Barker, H. (1990). The Europeans / Judith. London: John Calder (Publishers) Ltd.

Hitler, A. (quoted at) (2007, 05 18). General Paulus Nazi Germany. Retrieved 02 12, 2011, from Sparticus International : http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERpaulus.htm

Defending the indefensible? Paradise Found at the Menier

By coincidence, a week after I saw the opera Paradise Lost in Wrocław I saw a new musical called Paradise Found at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London. The musical has a book adapted from Joseph Roth's novel The Tale of the Thousand and Second Night by playwright Richard Nelson, and songs adapted from the waltzes of Johann Strauss II which have been festooned with lyrics by Ellen Fitzhugh. The musical has been more or less universally abused by critics and bloggers; I went to the theatre with a fair amount of trepidation, thinking that I was going to see something in the same league as the much (and deservingly) maligned Ernest Hemingway musical Too Close to the Sun. It surprised me that I came out at the end having actually liked some of Paradise Found.

I have ambivalent feelings about musicals and only booked for this as it has been co-directed by Harold Prince, whose 1980 Drury Lane production of Sweeney Todd was one of my formative theatre experiences, and the other shows I've seen of his have also been staging miracles – hell, he even managed to make Phantom of the Opera into a show I enjoyed, and I usually hate the work of Andrew Lloyd Webber.  During the first 20 or so minutes of Prince's new production, I felt that I was going to be in agreement with those that have derided it – it seemed a sloppy, leering and rather absurd musical about the Shah of Persia coming to Vienna in the late 19th century in order to cure his "ache" at not being able to raise an erection with any of his many wives or indeed with anyone in his homeland. The story is set up with such vulgarity that it's like being stuck in a confined space with a third-rate Zero Mostel impersonator who insists on telling you about his love-life, gestures and all. The Shah brings with him his head Eunuch (played by Mandy Patinkin in a performance of such counter-intuitive strangeness that I couldn't help but be spellbound by it) and this Eunuch is taken out on the town by a Viennese Baron whilst the Shah lies in bed nursing his lack of a hard-on. The poor old Eunuch is dragged from brothel to boudoir to what seems to be a 19th century heterosexual sex club complete with maze, as all the time with the cast sing with oomph these Strauss knock-off songs.

It was around 35 minutes into the show that I realised that I was actually, despite myself, rather enjoying it. By the time the Shah had raised himself from his bed, dragged himself to a Ball in his honour and got a stonking hard-on for the Empress, in response to which the Baron and the Eunuch conspire to dress a prostitute up as Her Majesty, disguise the brothel as a palace and satisfy the Shah by pretence I was veritably intrigued. The show seemed to be a rather extraordinary way of talking about the idea that desire can be fulfilled through illusion; I could see what had attracted intelligent theatre makers like Prince, his co-director Susan Stroman and others Broadway royalty to the piece, which far from being the old-fashioned froth which most people have dismissed it as seemed to me to be very much tuned into our age of promiscuity and readily available pornography, Vienna standing in as a bourgeois world par excellence in which anyone with the cash or a credit card can get themselves off to an illusion that they are shagging the object of their desire but where it is all being done by proxy. In this sense, Paradise Found seems to me to a remarkably postmodern work, dealing not only with the sense that reality and illusion are to Westerners now just as good as each other, but also postmodern in the sense that the songs were not so much adaptations by deconstructions of Strauss' music, making them sing about what their lavishness excludes – the dirty truth about the sex-industry economy which was the Vienna they were written for.

The second act of Paradise Found becomes stranger still, as the characters who have just been behaving like frantic cartoons in an end-of-pier sex farce reveal that there have real emotions and suffer real consequences for their behaviour. The tone of the show now veers wildly from the lubricious and vulgar to the heartfelt and stricken and it can't be said that the change of gear is a success aesthetically, except that such an awkward gear-change does make the proceedings much more like life. In refusing consistency of tone, the piece attains a kind of crazy realism (audiences and critics hate this kind of thing, which is an interesting phenomena worth thinking about in and of itself). The final quarter of the show is over-ambitious, to say the least, in trying to hang a late-Shakespearean All Is Forgiven and Redeemed ending on the piece, a la Pericles (which is also set partly in a brothel). The ending is mostly unsuccessful because the actor playing the Baron, Shuler Hensley, is so convincing at showing us a man whom circumstance, society, drink and lack of character have brought to a bad place, a place which there's no getting up from; the Broadway musical's traditional requirement for a happy resolution is shown to be in an irresolvable tension with what actually happens to people in society – which again is interesting in itself but kind of makes the show commit hari-kari before the audience's appalled eyes.

Paradise Found was, for me then, a mind-boggling experience and all the more fascinating for it; I found it more intriguing than many musicals that get audiences or critics or both salivating with raptures. Somewhere in his diaries, Joe Orton pours scorn on the idea that there can be such a thing as "an interesting failure" – yet with the right amount of mulling, some failures do give the mind much to be interested in.

Penderecki's Paradise Lost in Wrocław

My initial impetus for going to Wrocław was the coincidence that of finding that a Polish friend I'd lost and regained touch with was now living back there (I knew him previously in London) only a day or two of noticing that there was a rare performance of Penderecki's Paradise Lost at the opera house there. A trip to see my friend and this rarity proved irresistible.

The Wrocław opera are based in a good old traditional 19th century opera house with a prettily (some might think too prettily) decorated interior. The repertoire is mostly the staples (Puccini, Mozart, Verdi, Carmen) mixed with some more local favourites, for example The Haunted Manor and Król Roger; Penderecki is a Polish composer – perhaps the best known living one – but the inclusion of his relatively obscure 1978 setting of Milton's epic poem is an act of some bravery on their part. The Sunday afternoon performance I attended was about two thirds full, and the audience didn't feel particularly enthusiastic. Like a lot of people (I suppose), I was made aware of Penderecki's music by its inclusion on the soundtrack to The Shining; he had a fierce avant-garde reputation in the 1950s and 60s but since the 1980s he has taken a more conservative route which he refers to as him having "come to a point where it appears most creative to turn back and open the door we have shut behind us".  Paradise Lost is mid-period Penderecki and its sonorous, deep and gloomy music is well fitted to setting a text based on a work by the author of At a Solemn Music.

This is the second theatrical adaptation of Paradise Lost I have seen, after Rupert Gould's production of Ben Power's version for Headlong. Despite having being a relatively dialogic epic poem, whose writer made his own contribution to the Jacobean theatre scene with the masque Comus, Paradise Lost usually proves tricky to make dramatic.  Its scope is enormous, and its structure – whizzing from the fallen angels in hell through flashbacks to their rebellion in heaven onwards to the temptation of Adam and Eve and then flash-forwards to later events in Biblical history, there's too much there for a single play. Christopher Fry wrote the libretto for Penderecki and does a decent job of getting it down to a manageable two and a half hours but loses the battle in Heaven, which is one of the most dramatic sections of the poem. He brings Milton on stage at the beginning and at intervals throughout, to introduce and narrate the action; this is strong, as it suggests that what we are seeing are the visions of a bard, the performance our visionary experience. The Wrocław production began well, with Penderecki's music brooding over a dark stage, with the figure of blind Milton being led by a dogged boy gradually becoming clear as the lights rose – us being introduced to our own temporary form. Milton's part is spoken and has the great effect of an incantation.

In Fry's rearrangement of the material, Milton/we first see a moping Adam and Eve in postlapsarian guilt and despair over the loss of Eden. We then meet the hordes of hell, and witness the council at which the devils discuss how to deal with their fall. This structure works well and preserves a strength of the poem, wherein one gets the feeling of having backdrops lifted to show what lies behind each thing we encounter. The devils at Wrocław were dressed as a cross between Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings orcs and Clive Barker's Hellraiser team of Cenobites. This was a fairly straightforward visual imagining of the poem with devils looking ugly and devlish and angels looking pure and angelic. As these are poetic figurations, this didn't prevent me as an audience member reading them as signs but sometimes it did seem a bit obvious as a choice, even a little ludicrous at times – when the devils did a demon dance near the beginning, it looked a little like a geriatric version of the zombie routine from the Thriller video.

Satan is always going to be the focus of interest in Paradise Lost, as despite being the theologically the antagonist, dramatically he is the protagonist – goal orientated and driven in a way that none of the other characters are. In Wrocław he is dressed in leather trousers and cuts a half-attractive, half-campy figure. Piotr Nowacki sung him with an impressive authority but did a little too much swishing of his long leather coat, suggesting that this when he states it is "Better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven" I got the feeling he was going to be the Queen rather than the King. He had great moments though, best of all when he lurks and lingers voyeuristically observing the happy couple in Eden, a malcontent singleton who disses partnership whilst burning in the hell of lacking one. Whatever my qualms about the design and performance, Satan is the most energetic and compelling presence on stage; Adam and Eve begin as whiners and for most of the time either stay doing that or stay dull under God's law. Eve's giving in to temptation feels like the best decision she ever made, and Adam's best moment is when he takes the plunge himself, more committed to a life with the wife he loves that obedience to the laws of the God who made him.

Fry's best decision in the libretto is having two sets of performers as Adam and Eve – two singers, for the disquisitive  sections and two dancers for the action. The Adam dancer – sturdy Sergei Oberemok (who really does look the part of the Human Form Divine) – brilliantly expressed Adam's birth pangs in a coming to being more reminiscent of a Frankenstein movie than a Bible tale. Later, the two dancers perform a fairly raunchy consummation of their marriage – Milton was certainly the greatest poet of married love the world has known and here his words take a physical form which manages that most difficult of tasks for contemporary artists, to make marriage an erotic activity. A dance with anthropomorphic animals as Adam names them (as in one of Dylan's quirkiest Christian-period numbers) was less successful, being somewhat reminiscent of that long and best forgotten West End musical flop Children of Eden.

Eden in the Wrocław PL is a dubious place. The walls are plain and the angels walk around entirely dressed in white, as if this were some sinister private mental institution or science lab with Adam and Eve the inmates/subjects of experiment. God is never seen but spoken in an amplified voice; as his speeches are accompanied by a large ball hanging over Adam's head, there's something of The Prisoner about Adam's predicament. William Empson argued that Milton's God was a prediction of Stalin and this makes the production and story very relevant indeed for post-socialist Poland; the population has been tempted to escape from the prison-Eden of the Soviet era but the world waiting for them is one of toil and blood. It is ironic, given how antithetical to communism the Catholic church is, how close the God of creation in Milton (and, indeed, Genesis) is to a Stalinist authoritarian. In this reading, Satan would be the temptations of neoliberalism, promising freedom but providing struggle, wars, pestilence and pain.

Later in the libretto, as Michael shows Adam mankind's future, Fry calls for "A series of static and moving images from the beginning of time to the present, of man's physical and mental affliction." The projections were dispensed with by director Waldemar Zawodziński; a mime/dance in which nearly-naked extras stepped out of a pen with an iron-door to drop dead one by one was substituted; this had chilling resonances with the death camps, the most notorious and murderous of which are of course in Poland. What Michael presents to Adam as humanity's future is our terrifying recent past and potential present.

The final section of the opera is dramatically under-played and the performance ends on a tentative note. This is a little underwhelming but I can't quite make out whether it is a failing or a deliberate subversion of our expectations for climax and resolution. Penderecki didn't quite describe Paradise Lost as an opera, rather as sacra rappresentazione, a cross between opera and oratorio. At Wrocław, the chorus are offstage, on either side of the auditorium on the edges of the first circle, reminiscent of a church choir. Thus this performance of Penderecki's work attempts to abolish the differentiation between church-going and theatre-going, which is promising in the light of Blake's "What is a Church & What Is a Theatre? are they Two & not One? can they Exist Separate?" If theatres becoming churches meant the performance of ideologically leading works which disallow mental fight then this would be a bad thing but given that Penderecki's Paradise Lost points the way towards a deeply questioning and ambiguous spiritual tale, I found something in the performance deeply inspiring. The opera has all the virtues of Milton and all of his problematics (not least Messias, who in Zawodziński's mise-en-scene is a static marble-like figure in white, eerily reminding me of Syberberg's conception of Amfortas in his Parsifal film). The congregation/audience are presented with such thorny imagery and such a difficult and unfinished story and this makes Paradise Lost, for all the classical, Christian and conservative associations that Milton/Penderecki/Fry might suggest as a trio, a radical experience and not at all mere preaching or cant.

It hope that the opera becomes better known, as it does present us with what is still one of the fundamental stories of our civilisation in a way which expresses all its inspiring difficulties and sets them to music which is deep, dark, expressive and, whilst overly homogeneous for some tastes in the orchestrations, varied and fluent in its use of many voices, from speaking roles to counter-tenors and boy choirs.

Bond asks the nagging questions

Another encounter with a play about an artist, as I took a pilgrimage to Chichester to see the production of Edward Bond's 1973 play Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death. On the surface, this is a speculative bio-play concerning the last years of William Shakespeare, our National poet and generally considered to be, as Nick Hutchison writes in the programme,

"…the greatest playwright of all time, the greatest love poet, whose plays have come to represent all that is best in human artistic endeavour…" [1]

Bond's play begins with Shakespeare sitting in a garden contemplating a sheet of paper but it is neither a page from a script nor a poem but rather a reckoning of the amount he makes from the rents he makes from some sitting tenants on some local common fields. We soon learn that a local businessman, William Combe, is set on enclosing the land and Shakespeare wants assurances that his income will be maintained. Combe offers to compensate Shakespeare for any losses as long as Shakespeare agrees not to oppose the enclosures. In the first half of the play, alongside this business story, there is a subplot involving a young homeless woman who is at first whipped for disobeying the laws on vagrancy and then hung for setting some fires in Stratford-upon-Avon. By the end of the first part, we understand that Shakespeare retired to Stratford for rest and contemplation (buying New Place for this purpose) but is unable to stop thinking about the suffering he has seen in London and now continues to see in his Warwickshire hide-out. For most of the three scenes of Part One Shakespeare is reticent in his speech, but at the end of the Act he busts forth with an elongated speech envisioning a London awash with cruelty and crime.

The involvement of Shakespeare in the enclosures at the nearby village of Welcombe are a historical fact; Bond (in a 1973 note to the play [2]) references E K Chambers' 2 Volume William Shakespeare as a source for documentation and commentary. Despite this (and other assertions of this truth in the programme), some critics write as if this episode in Shakespeare's life is Bond's suggestion. Bond's play can cause extreme reactions from critics, but given that the play on the whole presents the bard as a humane and very deep thinker troubled by his own social situation, I am at a bit of a loss to understand why anyone should be offended by the portrait.

Of course, by the end of the play we have seen Shakespeare question his legacy as an artist (he continually asks himself "Was anything done?") and ends up taking poison and committing suicide, unable to find a way out of his despair at the world and some of his involvements in it (not only has his behaviour as a landlord been questionable, but he has neglected and alienated his wife and his younger daughter, Judith). Bond rather provocative wrote in 1973

'My account rather flatters Shakespeare. If he didn't end up the way shown in the play, then he was a reactionary blimp or some other fool. The only more charitable account is that he was unaware or senile.' [3]

Bond's view of Shakespeare as a man passionately concerned with social issues is borne out by any overview of the bard's work. In watching the play's scenes of a despairing Shakespeare wandering through a world in which judges condemn and hang homeless beggars, I couldn't help but think of Lear at the height of his "madness" – concerned in the storm for the "poor, naked wretches" and condemning judges as thieves (in Bingo, Combe is a magistrate). The play is asking important questions about a person's political and social role in the world, not merely an artist's role but every human's.  In Tony Coult's useful short book The Plays of Edward Bond, he quotes Albert Hunt (in a piece for New Society) accusing Bond of being someone who is

'…trapped by his own literary aspirations and has lost touch with the society he was trying to explain… it's not so much a question any longer of a "writer's theatre", as a theatre about writers.' [4]

Coult challenges this on the grounds that plays about artists are as valuable as plays about any other kind of worker (artists face the same social circumstances as anyone else) and also in that it is erroneous to assume that only artists enjoy plays about artists. I would agree with Coult here (I suppose I would say that, having written a number of plays about both fictional and historical artists in my time) but also add more about Bingo's positioning and impact as a theatre event.

Bingo came at a time when Bond was making inroads into the higher echelons of UK cultural life. After its premier at the Northcott in Exeter, it was performed at the Royal Court with John Gielgud as Shakespeare; soon after, Bond had work performed at the National Theatre, the RSC and the Royal Opera. Bingo was part of an ongoing project on his part to ask the most important questions about his society in those cultural institutions that were held to be the most prestigious. I had thought about using the word "infiltrate" in the previous but I realise that this would sound as if Bond was somehow coming from somewhere else and attacking a tradition; this is wrong, as Bond is very much the inheritor of the tradition of English drama and literature which through the past 500+ years has asked the pertinent questions. In a way, Bingo is analogous to Blake's epic poem Milton, in which the bard of the civil war returns to earth to separate what was visionary in his life and work from what was error.  Bond is correcting, building on and continuing Shakespeare's work.

Some critics dismiss Bond as a doctrinaire Marxist whose plays are mere propaganda for the cause. This does him an injustice, as it should be quite clear to any intelligent and sensitive audience member at Bingo that this is the work of a man who is struggling, like the play's protagonist, to understand his social situation. Bond shows Combe as a thief of land and shows the rebellion of a group of locals who dig up the enclosures, hoping to reverse the process; theirs is a revolt which has a vision of a better world at its centre (Christian in its symbolism, reminiscent of the writings of Winstanley) but which uses violence in achieving its aims, a violence which has unfortunate effects on innocent bystanders. Bond shows this struggle in all its complexity, portraying the leader of the rebels as a preaching, humourless puritan and giving Combe a speech which any revolutionary must struggle to answer:

'I live in the real world and try to make it work. There's nothing more moral than that. But you live in a world of dreams! What happens when you wake up? You find that real people can't live in your dreams. They don't fit, they're not good or sane or noble enough. So you turn to common violence and begin to destroy them.' [5]

In the last scene of the play, Combe and the leader of the protest are still arguing, in Shakespeare's bedroom. Shakespeare sits between them as they  accuse and counter-accuse, and as he does so he takes some poison. This is an extraordinary moment, capable of being taken in multi-dimensional ways. In one way, Bond is killing off Shakespeare here, asserting that a man who lived 400+ years ago isn't going to be able to help us sort out the social difficulties that face us. The character is expressing a need which many of us might feel, a need to hide in death rather than face historical or class problems. Or perhaps the sugar-coated poison is (as my companion on my trip to Chichester – Ben Francis – suggested to me after the performance) the false culture which takes us away from the real arguments of our lives. It was at this moment in Bingo I realised what a remarkable achievement the play is, one which hands to me as an audience member the question "Was anything done?", to ask myself about my life in a world which isn't very much different, in its injustices, brutality and social structure, to the one portrayed in the play. Was the Iraq invasion anything more than Western interests enclosing land in the middle east?

At the centre of the play's questioning is a problem of property which we must all face. Our main political parties encourage owner-occupation as the preferred living arrangement, and I couldn't help wondering as I was watching the play how many of our wealthy liberal writers have second properties on which they collect rent? I remember a few years ago, when I got a small inheritance, someone advising me that the best investment would be to buy to let (I did not follow this advice); friends of mine have been forced to move when their landlord needed to sell the home they were living in. The Shakespeare of Bingo faces a very current problem.

Bond's attempt to do ask the questions of our age our big arts institutions came to a bad end in the mid-80s, and his plays since then have been premiered either in a Theatre-in-Education environment in the UK or in Paris at the Théâtre National de Colline. Bond has a famous, ongoing feud with our National Theatre but the performance of Bingo at Chichester made it clear to me how important his voice is to the life of our mainstream drama; his plays ask the challenging questions and we do something when we confront them which is valuable to us. 

The production at Chichester, by Angus Jackson, is superb. Patrick Stewart (whose desire to play the role again instigated the production) is an intelligent, passionate and compelling Shakespeare, Ellie Haddington is beyond moving as the Old Woman who serves as his housekeeper and confidante and the rest of the cast give outstanding performances. Bond's plays are tricky to get right (I didn't much like the recent revival of The Sea in the West End) but here the full effect of his writing plays out. The whole experience is one I won't be forgetting in a hurry, and the central question will continue to nag.

[1] Hutchison, Nick 'Scenes of Money and Death' in Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death (Chichester Festival Theatre programme, 2010)
[2] Bond, Edward Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death (Methuen, 1974), p.xv
[3] Ibid., p.vii
[4] Coult, Tony The Plays of Edward Bond (Methuen, 1977), p.19
[5] Bond, p.36