A few years ago, we staged a full-scale production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in our church. It was the first full-length play that had been attempted, as part of St. John’s new initiative to revive the life of our local community through the arts. Our production had been a great success on many levels: it sold out for its four performances, drawing many people from far and wide to share in the life of the church; the cast and production-team, largely drawn from the congregation, grew much closer together in that time as we worked shoulder to shoulder over virtually half a year on the play; and we discovered, perhaps more than ever before, how great art, just like the great religions of the world, illuminates what it means to be human in any and every age. The young lover’s and the rude mechanical’s journey through the dark and magical woods near Athens, in Shakespeare’s comedy, is as good a metaphor as you will find in drama, for the process of spiritual awakening. Two or three years on from this triumph, I decided it was time to attempt another great mystical play, with actors drawn from our church and the wider community. Browsing through the bookshop at the National Theatre one morning, I found a new Penguin edition of Our Town, by the American playwright, Thornton Wilder. On the back cover it read:
Finding the theatre of the 1920’s lacking bite and conviction, Thornton Wilder set out to bring back realism and to celebrate the innocent, simple and religious… to endow individual experience with cosmic significance.
As I sat down to re-read the play in the foyer of the National, dotted with actors reading aloud their latest scripts, and ‘techies’ discussing lighting-rigs over coffee, I knew I’d found the latest project for The Space Drama Company.
The play tells the story of a small New Hampshire community, living in the decade before the First World-War. It charts the fortunes of two neighbouring families as their children pass through school, get married, and cope with the inevitable loss which comes through time. It is written to be staged with just a couple of tables and a few chairs, representing the adjacent family kitchens, and uses a narrator to sketch in the rest of the details of the town. It has been revived in New-York recently, to great acclaim, with particular praise for the stark, unsentimental presentation of the play in a small studio theatre off Broadway.
In November my own cast gathered for their first rehearsal in our new church hall. It is this forming of a family, a small creative community, which is one of the many delights of embarking on a new production. As a director, you know that even though there is an inevitable awkward tension to begin with, providing you’ve handled the company well, they’ll be living in each other’s pockets by first night. Finding the right blend of characters is vital to the whole project, rather like hosting a successful dinner party or, more seriously, forming a team for an expedition. There are a few notable additions to the usual core members of the company, which makes this a particularly exciting project. Two students from the sixth-form college where I teach in Surrey have been drafted in to play the teenage lovers, Emily and George. This has given them a welcome relief from the claustrophobic boarding-house existence, and relentless programme of their A’ Levels. As I drove them back to school after that first rehearsal, one of them said: “How wonderful to be part of the real world for a change”! There’s an interesting irony about such a positive appraisal of a Christian community, coming from eighteen years olds today! It has to be said, that it’s also a breath of fresh air for St. John’s, to have such talented and vital young adults as Betsy and George, making such a significant contribution to the life of our church.
Wilder wrote in his preface to the play that he wanted ‘to find a value beyond all price for the smallest events in our daily life’. So, the action of the drama involves just that: the delivery of the milk, two women stringing beans, the kids doing their home-work. Yet, he presents such apparent mundane events within an overall dramatic structure that causes us to exclaim, like one of the characters looking back on her life in Act Three: “so all that was going on and we never noticed”. As the character of Emily revisits her life from beyond the grave, towards the end of the play, she is pained by how even her family scarcely engages with her and meets her eye. This makes her final farewell to life all the more poignant, as she savours the sheer sensuality of being alive, one last time. It is in this sense that the play is deeply religious, without being didactic. True religion affirms that the whole of life is sacred, not just choir-practice or weddings and funerals (though the play includes all this too).
Much of the drama of the twentieth century from great writers like Chekhov and Tennessee Williams, gives us an opportunity to experience the profound significance of the minutiae of life, and thus trains us to engage more fully with the numinous behind the simple activities of every moment of our existence. A Russian family’s arrival and subsequent final departure from the old nursery of their beloved home in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, for example, is presented on stage with such graphic intensity that we are made to realize the profound significance of such fleeting moments. The sounds of the heavy bolts closing up the estate for winter at the end of the play, the fading noise of the carriages pulling away, and the brutal thud of the axe against the Cherry trees helps us to contemplate the ephemera of so much of what we cling to. This brings us to one of the many paradoxes of the Christian faith. On the one hand we must strive to relish the beauty of nature made sacred through the incarnation, on the other we must learn to detach ourselves from all which consumes our hearts and prevents us from moving forward into a deeper communion with the otherness of God. Emily, and through her the audience, are made tangibly aware of that paradox at the end of Our Town and this is why it is one of the great spiritual, if not Christian dramas, of the twentieth century.
Saturday, 9 January 2010
Saturday, 19 December 2009
Full Circle
It’s exactly a year since I started this series of reflections exploring faith through the arts. The time has come to draw a few conclusions. It’s been a wonderfully creative twelve months for me and those I work with on The Space Project in St. John’s. There’s been the series of Arts Weekends during Lent, the new play about Christina Rossetti, our second annual Arts Festival and the start of rehearsals for “Our Town.” Throughout the year I have found inspiration from exhibitions, live theatre, films, television drama and documentaries, novels, music and poetry-the whole range of arts which so enrich our lives. I have been nurtured too, by that hidden life of personal devotion and the rhythm of corporate worship in my church across the road pulsing steadily through the changing seasons in Sussex. All this is of course a gracious gift which repays us a thousand fold whatever we invest in it. It’s also nearly the end of the first decade of the new millennium. Ten years ago I was approaching forty and languishing in mid-life despair. I remember listening to the celebrations along the Thames on the radio and wondering somewhat dramatically if I would survive much longer into the new era. A couple of years later The Space Project was born out of that time of darkness and now, after half a dozen years of being at the forefront of St. John’s outreach to the wider community, it has been established as a registered charity. Looking back I recognize that crisis was a calling to release the powerful surge of creativity in myself and others especially within the context of the local church. In his eloquent and moving memoir, “Opening Doors and Windows,” the theatre director and Anglican minister James Roose-Evans writes, ‘Creativity, like a stream or river, will always find its outlets.’ Yet somehow the stream gets silted up both in individuals and institutions and the process of releasing the flow can be painful. In the same chapter of the book the author observes, ‘True creativity is closely linked with the inner spiritual life of each person. Yet strangely this is an area in which the Church in general shows little interest.’ I think this is true of our society generally. So many of my sixth-formers complain that education seems to have become about ticking boxes, rather than using their own imagination. So many of my colleagues and friends feel stifled, rather than inspired, by their work-place. This presents the Church of the new millennium with a real opportunity and an exciting challenge. As Roose-Evans goes on to say, ‘the majority of people posses, no matter how unused, real creative and imaginative faculties, so that the question is less one of educating people to appreciate the fine arts than of providing facilities and environments in which they can be and are actively encouraged to use their own creative faculties.’ At key points in its history, the Church has very much fulfilled this brief; the Mystery Plays in the medieval period are an excellent example of how ordinary craftsmen were encouraged and inspired in this way. Today, as the unseemly spectacle of talent contests with their preening panellists and melodramatic process of eliminating competitors threatens to turns us into a nation of couched potatoes, the Local Church can be the provider of these facilities and environments where true creativity and spirituality can flourish. This has certainly been my experience working on the Space Project in recent years. Let me leave you with just three examples. Today I was called by my friend Carl as he was doing his pub-rounds for Carlsberg in the lorry through the ice and snow. ‘They all need their bleedin’ Christmas booze,’ he moaned down the phone at me. He was calling to check his rehearsal time for a sketch for our Carol Service on Sunday. He then proceeded to recite his duologue down the phone with his work-mate gingerly standing in for our other actor. I think being part of the Space Drama Company keeps Carl sane although he continues to struggle with the Sunday services at the church. More significantly his creativity and larger than life personality are finding an outlet through St. John’s and we are all the richer for it. One of the cast members of “Our Town” Cordy does not go to our church or any other one as far as I know. Her marriage ended recently so I suppose this must be a very challenging phase of life for her. I met her at a dinner party some months ago and she told me that when she was young she really wanted to go to Drama School, but couldn’t pluck up the courage to give it a try. She now works on the other side of the camera in Television. I invited her to play a central role in the play which she remembered loving many years ago. She is coming on fine in rehearsals and proving to be one of the warmest, most encouraging members of our company. She may or may not start coming to the church but in reality she is already a big part of it. A man called Jon, a relatively new member of the congregation has started coming to ‘Open Space’ this year, a monthly workshop exploring faith through the arts. Jon is a builder by trade, but I have been particularly struck by his talent as a writer, as I mentioned in an earlier chapter. At our last meeting I set people the task of writing a short scene for the family service on Christmas Day featuring Mary and Joseph in the stable on the morning after the birth. Our vicar asked if I could provide a brief sketch which illustrated how the provision of food, a bath and fresh clothes for Mary can be seen as a metaphor for the hope of the Christian faith. Within less than twenty minutes Jon had scrawled the following scene which is a fitting climax to this book and will grace our service on Christmas Day. It’s not just a good short-sketch considering how little time it took, it’s also great theology!
Everything You Need - by Jon Ogan
Joseph takes hold of Jesus from Mary trying to take control of the situation
Joseph- Right my little man, let’s get you wrapped up and tucked away so I can sort out your poor Mum. I’ve got some water warming up over the fire, so we can get her cleaned up….
Mary- (Smiling) I’m fine!
Joseph- I’ll get some bread from the pack and some figs. You must eat.
Mary- (Smiling) I’m fine, Joseph.
Joseph- I’ll get my rug. You can sleep on that-at least it’s clean.
Mary- Joseph, I’m fine.
Joseph- How can you be fine? You must be exhausted and ache all over!
Mary- Honestly, Joseph, I’m fine.
Joseph- You must be hungry.
Mary- I’m fine.
Joseph- Surely you want to wash yourself, get cleaned up?
Mary- (Picking up the child) I’m fine Joseph. Stop fussing!
Joseph- Come on, Mary, wash, eat and sleep!
Mary- (Looking at Jesus) I’m fine. He’s everything I need.
Everything You Need - by Jon Ogan
Joseph takes hold of Jesus from Mary trying to take control of the situation
Joseph- Right my little man, let’s get you wrapped up and tucked away so I can sort out your poor Mum. I’ve got some water warming up over the fire, so we can get her cleaned up….
Mary- (Smiling) I’m fine!
Joseph- I’ll get some bread from the pack and some figs. You must eat.
Mary- (Smiling) I’m fine, Joseph.
Joseph- I’ll get my rug. You can sleep on that-at least it’s clean.
Mary- Joseph, I’m fine.
Joseph- How can you be fine? You must be exhausted and ache all over!
Mary- Honestly, Joseph, I’m fine.
Joseph- You must be hungry.
Mary- I’m fine.
Joseph- Surely you want to wash yourself, get cleaned up?
Mary- (Picking up the child) I’m fine Joseph. Stop fussing!
Joseph- Come on, Mary, wash, eat and sleep!
Mary- (Looking at Jesus) I’m fine. He’s everything I need.
Monday, 14 December 2009
Joan Baez
For someone with a passion for the arts and a wife who is a professional violinist I have a rather paltry CD collection. I sometimes wonder how I would fare on a show like Desert Island Discs as I have never been conscious of listening to particular music at key moments of my life. After a burst of enthusiasm in my teens, which had as much to do with keeping up with my friends than a serious engagement with the artist’s work, I lost interest in the Rock and Pop scene and haven’t as yet developed a really discerning appreciation of classical music despite Rachel’s influence. Every so often I feel a vague sense of ‘must try harder’ about all this and go and buy a CD which someone’s recommended but I seem to lack the patience to sit and really listen for any length of time. More recently since taking up singing lessons I have begun to enjoy a range of mainly classical composers like Vaughn-Williams and Roger Quilter and I suppose this is as good a way as any to really engage with music such as this. However, following a fascinating television documentary the other day about the American folk singer and activist Joan Baez, I braved the Christmas crowds to buy her latest CD “The Day After Tomorrow.”
As a musical Philistine I knew very little about Joan Baez before seeing the documentary but I am now in awe of this extraordinary woman. She burst onto the burgeoning folk scene in the late fifties admired by the young Bob Dylan among others with whom she later developed an intense relationship. He was especially impressed by her guitar playing at the time which he tried and failed to emulate, but it is her voice which, as she nears seventy, still cuts through. Watching her on Utube singing some of those great peace anthems of the sixties ( ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ ‘Where have All the Flowers Gone,’ ‘We Shall Overcome’) I am struck by the total lack of self-consciousness with which she delivers those heady lyrics. She sings without vocal adornment; her face is equally clear of the strange contortions and mannerisms which performers sometimes adopt to persuade us how much they really mean it. Fifty years on little has changed in her simple yet powerful performance, though she has apparently lost the kind of stage-fright of her youth which left her feeling like she was walking to her execution every time she approached the microphone; how well she did to hide it! I suppose what she possesses as a folk singer is a moral authority without a trace of bigotry or self-adulation. This gives her a directness which transmits the essence of a song straight from her soul to the audience. Her ethical stance as an artist has been with her from the start of her career. It was shaped by her Quaker upbringing (her father was a pacifist) and it was further ignited by listening to Martin Luther King in the early sixties. Since then she has protested and campaigned and sung on behalf of minorities and victims of injustice around the world for half a century and still shows little sign of letting up. She was imprisoned for trying to persuade soldiers to defy the draft for Vietnam in the seventies, but this did little to deter her: ‘I came out a stronger pacifist.’ Recently she approached the vast memorial in Washington to that war and felt a scream of distress welling up from deep within her as she saw the endless list of names inscribed there. It is surely this profound sense of right and wrong which inspires her music. Interestingly she has always sold the most records (she has six Gold Albums) when singing about the issues closest to her heart. One of the most moving moments of the documentary was a piece of footage of her out in Sarajevo in the early nineties during the civil war there. (Baez was invited to do a concert there by Lionel Rosenblat from Refugees International) As she was walking through the war-torn city she witnessed a large man in a tuxedo playing Albinoni’s Adagio on his cello in a public square as a sort of lament over the city. When he finished she embraced him as a kindred spirit and as he got up from his chair she sat down in his place and quite spontaneously began to sing ‘Amazing Grace’ in her own inimitable style. The Catholic theologian Tina Beattie underlines the force of such gestures by artists in a recent book:
“Art has the power to change the world, for great art exerts a different kind of power – not the power of violence and revolution, but the potent vulnerability of imagination and memory, of mourning and hope. Art is powerless in itself, and yet it stands in the path of every destructive and oppressive force. That is why every tyrant and ideologue has sought to silence or control the artistic imagination."
In the Bible, St. Matthew records how Jesus summed up the challenges of following him in his parable of the Sheep and the Goats; to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prisoner, refresh the thirsty and take care of the sick. This may be undertaken today more directly by front-line missionaries and activists, but as Baez has shown throughout a life-time as a singer, the artist may do so in less tangible but equally vital ways. For in a world of deprivation and hardship, especially, people hunger and thirst for a beauty which the arts at their best are able to conjure. They long to rediscover through songs and stories and images the freedom, dignity and wholeness which is the essence of their humanity.
Half-way through Advent, in this season of waiting patiently and hopefully for the coming of Christ, I am reminded of the words of the great Gospel song and Civil Rights anthem which Baez sung at Woodstock in 1969.
We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome some day
Oh, I do believe deep in my heart
We shall overcome some day.
Earlier this year she recorded a new version of this anthem with additional Farsi lyrics and posted it on Utube to encourage the people of Iran in their peaceful protest against oppression. Forty years on from Woodstock Joan Baez’s faith in the coming Kingdom is apparently undiminished.
As a musical Philistine I knew very little about Joan Baez before seeing the documentary but I am now in awe of this extraordinary woman. She burst onto the burgeoning folk scene in the late fifties admired by the young Bob Dylan among others with whom she later developed an intense relationship. He was especially impressed by her guitar playing at the time which he tried and failed to emulate, but it is her voice which, as she nears seventy, still cuts through. Watching her on Utube singing some of those great peace anthems of the sixties ( ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ ‘Where have All the Flowers Gone,’ ‘We Shall Overcome’) I am struck by the total lack of self-consciousness with which she delivers those heady lyrics. She sings without vocal adornment; her face is equally clear of the strange contortions and mannerisms which performers sometimes adopt to persuade us how much they really mean it. Fifty years on little has changed in her simple yet powerful performance, though she has apparently lost the kind of stage-fright of her youth which left her feeling like she was walking to her execution every time she approached the microphone; how well she did to hide it! I suppose what she possesses as a folk singer is a moral authority without a trace of bigotry or self-adulation. This gives her a directness which transmits the essence of a song straight from her soul to the audience. Her ethical stance as an artist has been with her from the start of her career. It was shaped by her Quaker upbringing (her father was a pacifist) and it was further ignited by listening to Martin Luther King in the early sixties. Since then she has protested and campaigned and sung on behalf of minorities and victims of injustice around the world for half a century and still shows little sign of letting up. She was imprisoned for trying to persuade soldiers to defy the draft for Vietnam in the seventies, but this did little to deter her: ‘I came out a stronger pacifist.’ Recently she approached the vast memorial in Washington to that war and felt a scream of distress welling up from deep within her as she saw the endless list of names inscribed there. It is surely this profound sense of right and wrong which inspires her music. Interestingly she has always sold the most records (she has six Gold Albums) when singing about the issues closest to her heart. One of the most moving moments of the documentary was a piece of footage of her out in Sarajevo in the early nineties during the civil war there. (Baez was invited to do a concert there by Lionel Rosenblat from Refugees International) As she was walking through the war-torn city she witnessed a large man in a tuxedo playing Albinoni’s Adagio on his cello in a public square as a sort of lament over the city. When he finished she embraced him as a kindred spirit and as he got up from his chair she sat down in his place and quite spontaneously began to sing ‘Amazing Grace’ in her own inimitable style. The Catholic theologian Tina Beattie underlines the force of such gestures by artists in a recent book:
“Art has the power to change the world, for great art exerts a different kind of power – not the power of violence and revolution, but the potent vulnerability of imagination and memory, of mourning and hope. Art is powerless in itself, and yet it stands in the path of every destructive and oppressive force. That is why every tyrant and ideologue has sought to silence or control the artistic imagination."
In the Bible, St. Matthew records how Jesus summed up the challenges of following him in his parable of the Sheep and the Goats; to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prisoner, refresh the thirsty and take care of the sick. This may be undertaken today more directly by front-line missionaries and activists, but as Baez has shown throughout a life-time as a singer, the artist may do so in less tangible but equally vital ways. For in a world of deprivation and hardship, especially, people hunger and thirst for a beauty which the arts at their best are able to conjure. They long to rediscover through songs and stories and images the freedom, dignity and wholeness which is the essence of their humanity.
Half-way through Advent, in this season of waiting patiently and hopefully for the coming of Christ, I am reminded of the words of the great Gospel song and Civil Rights anthem which Baez sung at Woodstock in 1969.
We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome some day
Oh, I do believe deep in my heart
We shall overcome some day.
Earlier this year she recorded a new version of this anthem with additional Farsi lyrics and posted it on Utube to encourage the people of Iran in their peaceful protest against oppression. Forty years on from Woodstock Joan Baez’s faith in the coming Kingdom is apparently undiminished.
Monday, 30 November 2009
In Praise of Shakespeare
The latest challenge for my monthly book group is to talk about someone who has had a profound influence on our lives. It could be someone living or dead, someone we have actually known personally or encountered through another medium such as literature. My book group is currently made up of half a dozen men in their forties or fifties. It includes a couple of doctors, one of whom is Colin, the former vicar of our church mentioned in the previous chapter, an English teacher, an inventor, and my playwright friend Simon who earns his money as an accountant. After considering a whole host of options I decided it had to be Shakespeare for me.
Like everyone, I encountered Shakespeare at school and then later, when I went to Drama College, I acted in one of his comedies and also a tragedy as part of my training. However, it wasn’t until I was in my late twenties that I first came under his spell. The autumn of 1988 was the low point of my life. My older brother, Adam, had died the summer before, the victim of a brutal mugging by Ladbroke Grove Canal in London. I was an out of work actor then with not much to shout about in my first few years in the business and I was back living with my mother in her small basement flat off the Portobello Road. We had begun to go to the Anglican Church around the corner on Sundays. Adam had been a regular attendee there and it felt the right thing to do though I had long since stopped going to Church after too much compulsory Chapel at Boarding school and the sort of wayward lifestyle in my late teens and twenties which had left me ‘far from home.’ The vicar of St. Peter’s, Bruce, immediately befriended us and one day when he came to visit, suggested I might like to use the beautiful neo-classical Church to put on a play. I assumed he meant with members of the congregation and vaguely imagined something about Noah’s Ark or a Passion play, but he was happy for me to involve whoever I wanted and to do pretty much whatever I liked. I had many actor-friends scattered around London who were ‘resting’ and desperate to be doing something creative regardless of whether I could pay them. I had got to know Twelfth Night at college and realized there were excellent parts for all my friends in this play. I decided I would direct the play as a memorial for Adam and this idea caused such a stir that even the BBC pitched up a few days before opening night to cover the story on their local news programme. The interviewer wondered whether a comedy was quite the right thing to remember the victim of such a brutal death by and I think I said something about Adam having a great sense of humour and of the ridiculous, just like the play. I know he would have found Malvolio’s absurd wooing of Olivia in his yellow stockings a joy! Looking back I think it was an inspired choice. Among its many themes it explores loss and grief and our capacity to overcome them which couldn’t have been more appropriate in the circumstances. However, it’s one thing to have an idea, another to carry it out. I had never directed a play before but frankly the best way to learn is to do it and there is no better material to cut your teeth on than Shakespeare. I remember pouring over my Arden edition of the play sprawled on the shaggy carpet of my mother’s open-plan lounge. I was utterly riveted by the challenge of bringing these words off the page with my cast and I think I said something to her about how I believed I had found my vocation. I wasn’t far wrong. People came from far and near, our past and present to enjoy the play and remember Adam. My father was working at the RSC at the time and brought such stage and screen-luminaries as Brian Glover, Phil Daniels and Colin Welland to see the production. Thanks to an excellent cast culled mainly from my peers at Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama, along with the glorious setting of the Church and the enthusiastic support of its members it was a great success. It felt like a rite of passage into the profession with my father, mother, and their friends from the business being so affirming and in a different sense a rite of passage into the life of the Church; the Prodigal had returned! Moreover, I had encountered the writer and the man who was to have such an influence on me in the coming years.
I was watching a programme presented by the philosopher and writer Roger Scroton the other day called, “Why Beauty Matters.” He was discussing the importance of the arts in fulfilling the universal thirst for beauty and emphasizing their redemptive nature, therefore, in a world of pain and suffering. I suppose this is what I encountered through Shakespeare some twenty years ago and continue to discover as I work on his plays as a director, teacher and still occasionally as an actor. His plays are indeed sublime and though they show a world of folly, coarseness and extreme cruelty they also reveal its beauty. The moment at the end of Twelfth Night when Viola sees her twin-brother whom she had supposed drowned is as moving as the finest master-piece by Rembrandt or most lyrical score by Mozart. Their moment of reconciliation is an image of the beautiful mystery of providence and resonates with our longing to find again the lost half of our lives devoured by the ‘blind waves and surges’ of the past. Though I had not lost a twin, I had most certainly lost a brother and so much else of my life by this stage seemed swallowed up by what Hamlet describes as ‘the whips and scorns of time.’
But as well as opening my eyes to beauty, Shakespeare has been my mentor and guide in my life as both artist and pilgrim soul as I’ve made my way in the world since the death of my older brother. For Shakespeare these two roles were surely as indivisible as those twins in Twelfth Night. I like to think his plays and his hugely successful life in the theatre were the creative outworking of a faith which he must surely have inherited from his Catholic father and what a legacy he left behind. Shakespeare experienced Elizabethan life in all its complexity, its contradictions, its joy and sorrow, comedy and tragedy. As a father he lost a child, saw his own father fall from grace, endured the scorn and envy of some of his contemporaries as a young playwright, and suffered the hypocrisy and sometimes vicious cruelty of the reformed Protestant Church. However, rather than be left bewildered or defeated by it all he gave shape and meaning to his experience and held up a mirror to nature for us all to contemplate both virtue and vice. His life in the theatre, at least, was surely a profoundly sensitive response to a Divine vocation which he followed to the end. His plays right up to The Tempest, his last full length play, continually reflect a man with great spiritual authority and integrity. He never became a mouth-piece for a movement or an ideology but rather saw the limitations of any single view-point whether political, religious or philosophical. He used his skills as a dramatist and master of rhetoric to explore the problems of life from the perspective of a whole cast of characters and left the audience space to come to their own conclusions at the end of the play. Many a preacher could learn a trick from this and Shakespeare would certainly have little truck with the sort of fundamentalist, dogmatic religion which has become so wearisome to so many today. In my own journey of faith his complex response to morality, to notions of good and evil explored in his drama have left me very wary of the kind of crude black and white thinking which sometimes passes for Christian truth.
I think what I love most about Shakespeare and what I need to learn most of all from his work, however, is his sheer emotional honesty. I have no idea whether this was a feature of his everyday life and I’m not sure it really matters. I find it a bit tedious when people self-righteously point out that writers such as, say, Dickens was actually horrible to his wife or that Shakespeare supposedly had an affair with the ‘dark lady’ of the sonnets or with the Earl of Southampton as if these allleged moral failings diminished their voice or even discredited their entire body of work. It may be that to have had a tankard of ale in a Southwark Tavern with the bard might have proved a surprisingly dull affair, but he was an artist and we encounter him most fully therefore through his art; here, nothing is held back. In his plays we encounter Shakespeare’s youthful passion through the characters of Romeo and Juliet, his fury at falsehood and corruption in Hamlet, his vulnerability and anguish through Lear and his broken and contrite heart in Prospero in the final speech of The Tempest. Here the actor stands naked before the audience, still in role as the Duke of Milan who has divested himself of his dark magical powers and yet also as the author himself confessing his weakness and need for absolution at the end of his final play.
Now my charms are all o’er thrown,
And what strength I have’s mine own
Which is most feint: now ‘tis true
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not
Since I have my Dukedom got,
And pardoned the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from your hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, Art to enchant;
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so, that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
Such vulnerability, such raw emotional honesty expressed so eloquently is the hallmark of a great soul. I will forever be in debt, like countless others, to the one who blazed a trail for the artist in every soul from every age.
Like everyone, I encountered Shakespeare at school and then later, when I went to Drama College, I acted in one of his comedies and also a tragedy as part of my training. However, it wasn’t until I was in my late twenties that I first came under his spell. The autumn of 1988 was the low point of my life. My older brother, Adam, had died the summer before, the victim of a brutal mugging by Ladbroke Grove Canal in London. I was an out of work actor then with not much to shout about in my first few years in the business and I was back living with my mother in her small basement flat off the Portobello Road. We had begun to go to the Anglican Church around the corner on Sundays. Adam had been a regular attendee there and it felt the right thing to do though I had long since stopped going to Church after too much compulsory Chapel at Boarding school and the sort of wayward lifestyle in my late teens and twenties which had left me ‘far from home.’ The vicar of St. Peter’s, Bruce, immediately befriended us and one day when he came to visit, suggested I might like to use the beautiful neo-classical Church to put on a play. I assumed he meant with members of the congregation and vaguely imagined something about Noah’s Ark or a Passion play, but he was happy for me to involve whoever I wanted and to do pretty much whatever I liked. I had many actor-friends scattered around London who were ‘resting’ and desperate to be doing something creative regardless of whether I could pay them. I had got to know Twelfth Night at college and realized there were excellent parts for all my friends in this play. I decided I would direct the play as a memorial for Adam and this idea caused such a stir that even the BBC pitched up a few days before opening night to cover the story on their local news programme. The interviewer wondered whether a comedy was quite the right thing to remember the victim of such a brutal death by and I think I said something about Adam having a great sense of humour and of the ridiculous, just like the play. I know he would have found Malvolio’s absurd wooing of Olivia in his yellow stockings a joy! Looking back I think it was an inspired choice. Among its many themes it explores loss and grief and our capacity to overcome them which couldn’t have been more appropriate in the circumstances. However, it’s one thing to have an idea, another to carry it out. I had never directed a play before but frankly the best way to learn is to do it and there is no better material to cut your teeth on than Shakespeare. I remember pouring over my Arden edition of the play sprawled on the shaggy carpet of my mother’s open-plan lounge. I was utterly riveted by the challenge of bringing these words off the page with my cast and I think I said something to her about how I believed I had found my vocation. I wasn’t far wrong. People came from far and near, our past and present to enjoy the play and remember Adam. My father was working at the RSC at the time and brought such stage and screen-luminaries as Brian Glover, Phil Daniels and Colin Welland to see the production. Thanks to an excellent cast culled mainly from my peers at Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama, along with the glorious setting of the Church and the enthusiastic support of its members it was a great success. It felt like a rite of passage into the profession with my father, mother, and their friends from the business being so affirming and in a different sense a rite of passage into the life of the Church; the Prodigal had returned! Moreover, I had encountered the writer and the man who was to have such an influence on me in the coming years.
I was watching a programme presented by the philosopher and writer Roger Scroton the other day called, “Why Beauty Matters.” He was discussing the importance of the arts in fulfilling the universal thirst for beauty and emphasizing their redemptive nature, therefore, in a world of pain and suffering. I suppose this is what I encountered through Shakespeare some twenty years ago and continue to discover as I work on his plays as a director, teacher and still occasionally as an actor. His plays are indeed sublime and though they show a world of folly, coarseness and extreme cruelty they also reveal its beauty. The moment at the end of Twelfth Night when Viola sees her twin-brother whom she had supposed drowned is as moving as the finest master-piece by Rembrandt or most lyrical score by Mozart. Their moment of reconciliation is an image of the beautiful mystery of providence and resonates with our longing to find again the lost half of our lives devoured by the ‘blind waves and surges’ of the past. Though I had not lost a twin, I had most certainly lost a brother and so much else of my life by this stage seemed swallowed up by what Hamlet describes as ‘the whips and scorns of time.’
But as well as opening my eyes to beauty, Shakespeare has been my mentor and guide in my life as both artist and pilgrim soul as I’ve made my way in the world since the death of my older brother. For Shakespeare these two roles were surely as indivisible as those twins in Twelfth Night. I like to think his plays and his hugely successful life in the theatre were the creative outworking of a faith which he must surely have inherited from his Catholic father and what a legacy he left behind. Shakespeare experienced Elizabethan life in all its complexity, its contradictions, its joy and sorrow, comedy and tragedy. As a father he lost a child, saw his own father fall from grace, endured the scorn and envy of some of his contemporaries as a young playwright, and suffered the hypocrisy and sometimes vicious cruelty of the reformed Protestant Church. However, rather than be left bewildered or defeated by it all he gave shape and meaning to his experience and held up a mirror to nature for us all to contemplate both virtue and vice. His life in the theatre, at least, was surely a profoundly sensitive response to a Divine vocation which he followed to the end. His plays right up to The Tempest, his last full length play, continually reflect a man with great spiritual authority and integrity. He never became a mouth-piece for a movement or an ideology but rather saw the limitations of any single view-point whether political, religious or philosophical. He used his skills as a dramatist and master of rhetoric to explore the problems of life from the perspective of a whole cast of characters and left the audience space to come to their own conclusions at the end of the play. Many a preacher could learn a trick from this and Shakespeare would certainly have little truck with the sort of fundamentalist, dogmatic religion which has become so wearisome to so many today. In my own journey of faith his complex response to morality, to notions of good and evil explored in his drama have left me very wary of the kind of crude black and white thinking which sometimes passes for Christian truth.
I think what I love most about Shakespeare and what I need to learn most of all from his work, however, is his sheer emotional honesty. I have no idea whether this was a feature of his everyday life and I’m not sure it really matters. I find it a bit tedious when people self-righteously point out that writers such as, say, Dickens was actually horrible to his wife or that Shakespeare supposedly had an affair with the ‘dark lady’ of the sonnets or with the Earl of Southampton as if these allleged moral failings diminished their voice or even discredited their entire body of work. It may be that to have had a tankard of ale in a Southwark Tavern with the bard might have proved a surprisingly dull affair, but he was an artist and we encounter him most fully therefore through his art; here, nothing is held back. In his plays we encounter Shakespeare’s youthful passion through the characters of Romeo and Juliet, his fury at falsehood and corruption in Hamlet, his vulnerability and anguish through Lear and his broken and contrite heart in Prospero in the final speech of The Tempest. Here the actor stands naked before the audience, still in role as the Duke of Milan who has divested himself of his dark magical powers and yet also as the author himself confessing his weakness and need for absolution at the end of his final play.
Now my charms are all o’er thrown,
And what strength I have’s mine own
Which is most feint: now ‘tis true
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not
Since I have my Dukedom got,
And pardoned the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from your hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, Art to enchant;
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so, that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
Such vulnerability, such raw emotional honesty expressed so eloquently is the hallmark of a great soul. I will forever be in debt, like countless others, to the one who blazed a trail for the artist in every soul from every age.
Monday, 16 November 2009
Choral Evensong on Armistice Day
There’s a performance which has been running non-stop for more than three hundred years in some of the most theatrical buildings throughout the world. Its essential script and structure has remained virtually unaltered in that time. It invariably includes ancient poetry dating back as far as the late bronze-age set to some of the most beautiful choral music from the renaissance period up to the present day. Its form encourages active participation from an audience congregated in the most beautiful of settings- and it doesn’t cost a penny. Despite its ancient origins, (the roots of the service come from the early monastic tradition) Choral Evensong seems as relevant to the great concerns of the day as ever. This one will no doubt run and run and indeed such is its continuing popularity that it has been broadcast at least once a week on BBC Radio 3 since 1927.
On Armistice Day this year, the broadcast came from my Diocesan Cathedral, Chichester, although I didn’t catch up with it till the following Sunday when it was repeated at 4 pm. Now I must be honest and confess that this was virtually my first, albeit vicarious, experience of Choral Evensong but I listened to the service partly because it came from Chichester and also since I am becoming increasingly aware of the rich heritage of traditional Anglican forms of worship as I approach fifty. As an artist, and specifically a man of the theatre, I can recognize the irresistible dramatic force of rituals such as these. Acts of worship at their best are like great theatre in so far as they confront us with the reality of the human condition and yet enable us to transcend it, or at least see ourselves in the context of a bigger picture. Recently the news has been full of tragic stories of soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Last week the Prime Minister was lambasted by a distraught mother because he wrote what appeared to be a hastily scrawled letter of condolence in which he misspelled her dead son’s name. The government is being hounded by the media for its alleged failure to properly equip and thus protect its troops. Bitter arguments rage back and forth about the rights and wrongs of this war to the point where we are almost at each other’s throats and have forgotten how and why the war in Afghanistan began. It seems our society badly needs to regain a more sober perspective on events and perhaps a humbler one.
Well it certainly worked for me last Sunday as I sat on my bed and tuned into Radio Three as the afternoon light began to fade outside. The sound of the choir singing Purcell’s ‘Thou Knowest, Lord, the Secrets of Our Hearts’ for the introit immediately lifted me out of the vague lethargy and distraction of a typical Sunday afternoon spent at home. As the liturgy began, I remembered I had a copy of The Book of Common Prayer and so I could follow the familiar general confession which reminds us that ‘we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep’ and ‘followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.’ (Food for thought indeed!) I was especially struck by the chanting of the psalms which I also managed to follow in my edition of the prayer book. Singing through The Book of Psalms is at the heart of Choral Evensong and goes back to the earliest forms of Christian worship. As I suggested earlier, many of these religious poems were written as early as the end of the Bronze Age and were probably in many cases re-workings of even more ancient Canaanite or Egyptian texts. The psalms remind us that war has been with us since the dawn of civilization and that humanity has from the earliest times sought deliverance and hope by reciting prayers and hymns to God or gods with words which remain as poignant as ever: ‘O be thou our help in trouble, for vain is the help of man.’(Psalm 60) The Old Testament reading in the service was from the Book of Micah in which the prophet looks to ‘the last days’ and famously declares: ‘And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.’ (Chapter 4) One of the great things about Evensong is the absence of a sermon and so the full force of ancient prophetic words like this are left to speak for themselves. We are made to wonder at the mysterious authority of such profound utterance. After the reading of the Beatitudes from the Gospel of Matthew which includes Christ’s timely encouragement, ‘blessed are the peacemakers,’ the choir sung an anthem by Maurice Greene based around some verses from Psalm 39: ‘Lord, Let me Know Mine End.’ This beautiful setting by the English composer gently reminds us of our mortality and teaches us to reflect deeply on this reality. How many of the man-made catastrophes throughout the ages such as war erupt when we lose touch with the ground of our being and imagine ourselves as immortal gods? The service concluded with the Hymn, ‘All My Hope on God is Founded.’ Seeing in my copy of the Radio Times that this was coming up, I quickly dug out a hymn book from another room so I could join in with the congregation. Both the music and the words are wonderfully transcendent and full of hope whilst remaining utterly realistic about the perennial failings of every human society. For me and no doubt many others that Sunday, and indeed the previous Armistice Day, this glorious hymn together with the rest of the service put the world to rights, at least for the time being:
Pride of man and earthly glory,
sword and crown betray his trust;
what with care and toil he buildeth,
tower and temple, fall to dust .
but God’s pow’r,
hour by hour,
is my temple and my tower.
On Armistice Day this year, the broadcast came from my Diocesan Cathedral, Chichester, although I didn’t catch up with it till the following Sunday when it was repeated at 4 pm. Now I must be honest and confess that this was virtually my first, albeit vicarious, experience of Choral Evensong but I listened to the service partly because it came from Chichester and also since I am becoming increasingly aware of the rich heritage of traditional Anglican forms of worship as I approach fifty. As an artist, and specifically a man of the theatre, I can recognize the irresistible dramatic force of rituals such as these. Acts of worship at their best are like great theatre in so far as they confront us with the reality of the human condition and yet enable us to transcend it, or at least see ourselves in the context of a bigger picture. Recently the news has been full of tragic stories of soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Last week the Prime Minister was lambasted by a distraught mother because he wrote what appeared to be a hastily scrawled letter of condolence in which he misspelled her dead son’s name. The government is being hounded by the media for its alleged failure to properly equip and thus protect its troops. Bitter arguments rage back and forth about the rights and wrongs of this war to the point where we are almost at each other’s throats and have forgotten how and why the war in Afghanistan began. It seems our society badly needs to regain a more sober perspective on events and perhaps a humbler one.
Well it certainly worked for me last Sunday as I sat on my bed and tuned into Radio Three as the afternoon light began to fade outside. The sound of the choir singing Purcell’s ‘Thou Knowest, Lord, the Secrets of Our Hearts’ for the introit immediately lifted me out of the vague lethargy and distraction of a typical Sunday afternoon spent at home. As the liturgy began, I remembered I had a copy of The Book of Common Prayer and so I could follow the familiar general confession which reminds us that ‘we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep’ and ‘followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.’ (Food for thought indeed!) I was especially struck by the chanting of the psalms which I also managed to follow in my edition of the prayer book. Singing through The Book of Psalms is at the heart of Choral Evensong and goes back to the earliest forms of Christian worship. As I suggested earlier, many of these religious poems were written as early as the end of the Bronze Age and were probably in many cases re-workings of even more ancient Canaanite or Egyptian texts. The psalms remind us that war has been with us since the dawn of civilization and that humanity has from the earliest times sought deliverance and hope by reciting prayers and hymns to God or gods with words which remain as poignant as ever: ‘O be thou our help in trouble, for vain is the help of man.’(Psalm 60) The Old Testament reading in the service was from the Book of Micah in which the prophet looks to ‘the last days’ and famously declares: ‘And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.’ (Chapter 4) One of the great things about Evensong is the absence of a sermon and so the full force of ancient prophetic words like this are left to speak for themselves. We are made to wonder at the mysterious authority of such profound utterance. After the reading of the Beatitudes from the Gospel of Matthew which includes Christ’s timely encouragement, ‘blessed are the peacemakers,’ the choir sung an anthem by Maurice Greene based around some verses from Psalm 39: ‘Lord, Let me Know Mine End.’ This beautiful setting by the English composer gently reminds us of our mortality and teaches us to reflect deeply on this reality. How many of the man-made catastrophes throughout the ages such as war erupt when we lose touch with the ground of our being and imagine ourselves as immortal gods? The service concluded with the Hymn, ‘All My Hope on God is Founded.’ Seeing in my copy of the Radio Times that this was coming up, I quickly dug out a hymn book from another room so I could join in with the congregation. Both the music and the words are wonderfully transcendent and full of hope whilst remaining utterly realistic about the perennial failings of every human society. For me and no doubt many others that Sunday, and indeed the previous Armistice Day, this glorious hymn together with the rest of the service put the world to rights, at least for the time being:
Pride of man and earthly glory,
sword and crown betray his trust;
what with care and toil he buildeth,
tower and temple, fall to dust .
but God’s pow’r,
hour by hour,
is my temple and my tower.
Monday, 9 November 2009
End Game at Advent
It’s early November now and the Christian year is coming to a close with Advent just a few weeks away. The mist this morning shrouded all but the essential details of my route as I ferried my wife and kids to their respective schools. It’s strange how such a grey haze devoid of colour and the intricate forms of the landscape focuses the mind on what really matters. The cherry trees outside my window are stripped to just a few tattered leaves hanging limply from their spindly branches. The trees’ dark structure is etched against the pale sky now the fog has cleared and I think back to springtime when they were so fleetingly in bloom. On Friday we took the students at my school to see “End Game” in the West End. The play starring Mark Rylance and Simon Mc Burney was written by arguably the greatest dramatist of the twentieth century, Samuel Beckett. Some people find Beckett’s plays either incomprehensible or so utterly bleak that they have little stomach or patience for them. I suspect many Christians would bridle at their apparent nihilism. In his most famous play, “Waiting for Godot” one of the characters makes the following observation about humanity: ‘They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.’ However, as this magnificent production of one of his other great works demonstrated, Beckett’s perception of the human condition is so brilliantly illuminated because it is invariably pared to the bare bones by this master craftsman of dramatic technique.
In End Game a tyrannical old rogue Hamm sits in a bare room, shrouded by grey light. He is unable to stand and his useless legs dangle impotently just above the floor. There are two high windows in this cell which, so we are informed, look out on one side to the earth and on the other to the ocean. His aged parents live in two metal ashbins placed side by side at the front of the stage. We only ever see their drawn faces peeping out and spindly fingers feebly gripping the rim of the bins like animals in a cage. Hamm lords it over them and his sad clown of a servant Clov. This pathetic figure is apparently unable to sit down thus heightening the anguish of the daily trial of serving his master. Hamm summons his servant from an off-stage kitchen by blasting his shrill whistle and he perceives their life together as a game which must be played to its bitter end; hence the title. On one level Beckett exploits these surreal elements to create some familiar comic routines based around clowning and vaudeville acts involving age-old conflicts between masters and servants; but he also uses them as a metaphor for how life can so often feel for many people today. The old may identify with, and even laugh at, the image of life reduced to living in a dustbin, waiting to be fed and hoping to die; old peoples homes can sometimes seem little more than this. Those of us who seem to have spent our lives going through the same predictable routines at work and at home simply to keep a roof over our heads will surely understand Clov’s maddening frustration as he endlessly carries out his master’s bidding. How many of us sit in dreary meetings wondering what on earth we’re doing as we work through apparently unchanging agendas that never seem to change anything. Hamm’s furious, impotent ranting and absurd posturing are hysterically funny in Mark Rylance’s virtuoso performance but they are also perhaps a fair, if somewhat heightened, reflection of our own vainglorious existence emphasizing our futile quest to assert control over our fellow man and the world around us. The writer of Ecclesiastes in the Bible would have recognized Beckett’s world all too clearly. Indeed the first lines of this treatise on the human condition could have been written by Beckett himself: ‘“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”’ The book continues in words akin to those quoted from “Waiting for Godot” earlier: ‘Naked a man comes from his mother’s womb, and as he comes so he departs. He takes nothing from his labour that he can carry in his hand.”
Both Beckett and the Biblical scribe seem to take a perverse pleasure in using their poetic vision to shatter our fanciful illusions of the neat and ordered ‘picket-fence’ existence we are inclined to take refuge behind. However, we can choose to respond to Beckett’s bleak comedy either positively or negatively. We may, rather like the characters in his plays, remain stubbornly entrenched in our false existence, 'waiting for Godot' or playing the same old games over and over again. More positively we may allow his shocking, brutal humour to wake us up from our torpor and begin in us the work of redemption. Advent is also a wake up call. It reminds us what is essential; the birth of Christ and his imminent return. It challenges us to wait in the darkness of winter for the light of Christ to dawn. At Worth Abbey, the Benedictine monastery just down the road from me in West Sussex, the monks keep their walls free of decorations till Christmas Eve. This keeps them focused on the essence of their vocation which is to make room in their lives for what really matters. We would do well, this Advent, to do the same.
In End Game a tyrannical old rogue Hamm sits in a bare room, shrouded by grey light. He is unable to stand and his useless legs dangle impotently just above the floor. There are two high windows in this cell which, so we are informed, look out on one side to the earth and on the other to the ocean. His aged parents live in two metal ashbins placed side by side at the front of the stage. We only ever see their drawn faces peeping out and spindly fingers feebly gripping the rim of the bins like animals in a cage. Hamm lords it over them and his sad clown of a servant Clov. This pathetic figure is apparently unable to sit down thus heightening the anguish of the daily trial of serving his master. Hamm summons his servant from an off-stage kitchen by blasting his shrill whistle and he perceives their life together as a game which must be played to its bitter end; hence the title. On one level Beckett exploits these surreal elements to create some familiar comic routines based around clowning and vaudeville acts involving age-old conflicts between masters and servants; but he also uses them as a metaphor for how life can so often feel for many people today. The old may identify with, and even laugh at, the image of life reduced to living in a dustbin, waiting to be fed and hoping to die; old peoples homes can sometimes seem little more than this. Those of us who seem to have spent our lives going through the same predictable routines at work and at home simply to keep a roof over our heads will surely understand Clov’s maddening frustration as he endlessly carries out his master’s bidding. How many of us sit in dreary meetings wondering what on earth we’re doing as we work through apparently unchanging agendas that never seem to change anything. Hamm’s furious, impotent ranting and absurd posturing are hysterically funny in Mark Rylance’s virtuoso performance but they are also perhaps a fair, if somewhat heightened, reflection of our own vainglorious existence emphasizing our futile quest to assert control over our fellow man and the world around us. The writer of Ecclesiastes in the Bible would have recognized Beckett’s world all too clearly. Indeed the first lines of this treatise on the human condition could have been written by Beckett himself: ‘“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”’ The book continues in words akin to those quoted from “Waiting for Godot” earlier: ‘Naked a man comes from his mother’s womb, and as he comes so he departs. He takes nothing from his labour that he can carry in his hand.”
Both Beckett and the Biblical scribe seem to take a perverse pleasure in using their poetic vision to shatter our fanciful illusions of the neat and ordered ‘picket-fence’ existence we are inclined to take refuge behind. However, we can choose to respond to Beckett’s bleak comedy either positively or negatively. We may, rather like the characters in his plays, remain stubbornly entrenched in our false existence, 'waiting for Godot' or playing the same old games over and over again. More positively we may allow his shocking, brutal humour to wake us up from our torpor and begin in us the work of redemption. Advent is also a wake up call. It reminds us what is essential; the birth of Christ and his imminent return. It challenges us to wait in the darkness of winter for the light of Christ to dawn. At Worth Abbey, the Benedictine monastery just down the road from me in West Sussex, the monks keep their walls free of decorations till Christmas Eve. This keeps them focused on the essence of their vocation which is to make room in their lives for what really matters. We would do well, this Advent, to do the same.
Saturday, 31 October 2009
The Road
An excellent English Literature teacher at my school sometimes gives me a tip for a good read, especially near the start of a holiday. Her latest recommendation was The Road by Cormac Mc Carthy and I was not disappointed with her suggestion, polishing it off in virtually one sitting during the half-term break. This winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2007 tells a story of Biblical proportions about a father and son who have survived some unspecified cataclysmic event that has reduced America and possibly most of the world to little more than dust and ashes. We soon discover that within this shrivelled landscape, human society has been stripped of any veneer of civilization and thus sinister gangs of cannibals roam the scorched woods and wasted cities. The freezing winter is beginning to bite, and father and son must move south to the sea to have any chance of survival. Their life on the road becomes a primal quest for food, shelter, and personal safety, though beyond this they both hunger for hope and search for meaning to sustain them. The boy constantly seeks for reassurance that they will ultimately be met by goodness, and tries to internalize the mantra his father has taught him that they must ‘carry the fire.’ On this level, the story is universal, but it has touched a particular nerve today as the notion of a ruined earth, either through nuclear annihilation or global warming, increasingly haunts us. Indeed British environmental campaigner, George Monbiot was so struck by the book that he declared that Cormac Mc Carthy was one of fifty people who could yet, save the planet. He went onto praise the book with words which affirm the power of the arts to transform our society:
“It contains no graphs, no tables, no facts, figures, warnings, predictions or even arguments. Nor does it carry a single dreary sentence, which, sadly, distinguishes it from most environmental literature. It is a novel, first published a year ago, and it will change the way you see the world."
It has now been released as a feature film, which will hopefully ensure that Mc Carthy’s dystopian vision challenges a wide audience on both sides of the Atlantic, although inevitably much of the savage beauty of the writer’s prose will inevitably be lost in the screen version. Disturbing images have become such common currency for most of us today in our media culture that perhaps we need more than ever the power of language to open our eyes to see the world afresh and shake us out of our complacency. I wonder if any cinematic shot will evoke the horror of post-acopaclyptic cities and their inhabitants quite like this description:
“The long concrete sweeps of the interstate exchanges like the ruins of a vast funhouse against the distant murk….The mummied dead everywhere. The flesh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to tug and taut as wires. Shriveled and drawn like latterday bog-folk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth. They were discalced to a man like pilgrims of some common order for all their shoes were long since stolen.”
Global Warming and the environment is the burning (sorry!) issue of the day and thankfully, the Church has begun to speak urgently about the problem along with many others. Archbishop Rowan Williams has surely one of the more resonant voices for this and many other contemporary debates and he spoke powerfully at a lecture in Southwark Cathedral recently. Like Mc McCarthy, Williams sees the connection between the gradual destruction of our planet and the increasing degradation of our humanity, but rather than pressing the panic button he urges us to consider what we have lost in our reckless plundering of the earth’s resources and how we can work to restore it:
“Many of the things which have moved us to towards ecological disaster have been distortions in our sense of who and what we are, and their overall effect has been to isolate us more and more from the reality we are part of. Our response to the crisis needs to be a reality check, a rediscovery of our responsibility for the material world. And this is why the apparently small scale action that changes personal habits and local possibilities is so crucial”
I’m sure Williams is right but as Monbiot has implied it may take the artist in the first instance, rather than the campaigners or clergy, to galvanize us to make that change.
“It contains no graphs, no tables, no facts, figures, warnings, predictions or even arguments. Nor does it carry a single dreary sentence, which, sadly, distinguishes it from most environmental literature. It is a novel, first published a year ago, and it will change the way you see the world."
It has now been released as a feature film, which will hopefully ensure that Mc Carthy’s dystopian vision challenges a wide audience on both sides of the Atlantic, although inevitably much of the savage beauty of the writer’s prose will inevitably be lost in the screen version. Disturbing images have become such common currency for most of us today in our media culture that perhaps we need more than ever the power of language to open our eyes to see the world afresh and shake us out of our complacency. I wonder if any cinematic shot will evoke the horror of post-acopaclyptic cities and their inhabitants quite like this description:
“The long concrete sweeps of the interstate exchanges like the ruins of a vast funhouse against the distant murk….The mummied dead everywhere. The flesh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to tug and taut as wires. Shriveled and drawn like latterday bog-folk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth. They were discalced to a man like pilgrims of some common order for all their shoes were long since stolen.”
Global Warming and the environment is the burning (sorry!) issue of the day and thankfully, the Church has begun to speak urgently about the problem along with many others. Archbishop Rowan Williams has surely one of the more resonant voices for this and many other contemporary debates and he spoke powerfully at a lecture in Southwark Cathedral recently. Like Mc McCarthy, Williams sees the connection between the gradual destruction of our planet and the increasing degradation of our humanity, but rather than pressing the panic button he urges us to consider what we have lost in our reckless plundering of the earth’s resources and how we can work to restore it:
“Many of the things which have moved us to towards ecological disaster have been distortions in our sense of who and what we are, and their overall effect has been to isolate us more and more from the reality we are part of. Our response to the crisis needs to be a reality check, a rediscovery of our responsibility for the material world. And this is why the apparently small scale action that changes personal habits and local possibilities is so crucial”
I’m sure Williams is right but as Monbiot has implied it may take the artist in the first instance, rather than the campaigners or clergy, to galvanize us to make that change.
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