Under a Spotlight

Take an atheist playwright or two, a handful of professional actors ( some Christian, a Buddhist, an agnostic) and a sixty strong audience, largely, though not exclusively drawn from our local Anglican congregation, and what do you get? Well strangely enough, much agreement about the Christian faith today. ‘Under a Spotlight’ was the penultimate arts event in our Lent series ‘Visions in the Wilderness.’ The evening consisted of rehearsed readings from three contemporary plays which have taken Christianity as their central theme. ‘Racing Demon’ was David Hare’s examination of Anglicanism’s growing identity crisis at the end of the last millennium, ‘On Religion’ was A.C. Grayling’s recent dissection of the conflict between faith and reason at the start of the current one, and ‘The Last Days of Judas Iscariot’ by Stephen Adly Guirgis, set the most infamous betrayal of history in post 9/11 New York with Christ, Satan, and even Mother Theresa speaking the language of the Bronx.

From ‘Racing Demon’ we presented the opening scene where The Bishop of Southwark challenges the incumbent of one of his local parishes to ‘look cheerful’ whilst giving communion to his congregation, to ‘put on a show,’ regardless of his disillusionment with the sacramental side of his ministry. The Rev. Lionel Espy has long since questioned the purpose of such rituals in the context of his inner city parish, filled with the underclass of post-Thatcherite Britain.

In Grayling’s play, we staged the scene in which Grace, a Dawkinsesque figure, confronts her grown-up son about his decision to train for the priesthood. They have been listening to yet another news bulletin, detailing the latest bombings by religious extremists, and she asserts that ‘his lot (the so called religious moderates) provide cover for the nutters.’ Tom however is a child of post-modernism and lives with the tensions and contradictions of his world-view.

We also dramatized the final scene from ‘The Last Days of Judas…’ where Jesus visits his betrayer in his Bronx purgatory, to try and awaken him from his catatonic state. Judas utters vicious curses, accusing Christ of betraying him. Jesus gives as good as he gets, provoking Judas to acknowledge that by denying him, he is living a lie. It is a breath-taking scene that was brilliantly played by two actors at the top of their game. After all the intellectual arguments from the previous plays about the nature of religion, it seemed to distil the whole thing down to something more simple, and yet more profound. Can we let go of the failures of our past, and let ourselves be loved once again? When we open ourselves to love, as Judas did, as any of us do when we discover the intense power of our spirituality, we open up a can of worms! These may consist of those tensions and contradictions Tom talks about in ‘On Religion’ and they certainly include our mixed up, messy humanity which we so often cover up beneath the polished surface of our carefully rehearsed words and manner. Relationships are inevitably messy, and Christianity is above all the call to get involved with others- The Holy Trinity and the Church, which may include dealing with its infuriating Bishops and ‘religious nutters’. In ‘On Religion,’ Grace, the archetypal rationalist only discovers the true meaning of relationship, when her son is brutally murdered in a bombing. Her cold, theoretical world-view is blown apart, as she has to help organize his religious funeral and deal with the apparently irrational process of grief. We presented a speech from one of the most moving scenes from the play when Tom’s fiancé Ruth, confronts Grace at Tom’s grave two years on from his death. When I first saw the play at The Soho Theatre, I was struck by the rawness of emotion spilling onto the stage. Grace who up to then had been so self-contained and cool, was reduced to a snotty nosed, snivelling child, howling with pain as Ruth confronted her with the reality of Tom’s death. Our spiritual growth challenges us to confront a reality which is often painful to acknowledge, and work our way through it with a sometimes blind faith. Judas in the play, seems unwilling to do this, and remains forever frozen in his catatonic state. In ‘On Religion’ Grace does eventually soften sometime after Tom’s death, and the audience are left with hope regarding her future.

At the end of the presentations we discussed the issues the play had raised with our audience. It is always difficult to do something like this in such a large group but it was worth it nonetheless. As I said at the beginning of this reflection, there was much agreement and empathy with what the playwrights and actors had created, in spite of our differing belief systems. However, I think theatre works its’ miracles primarily in the shared moment of performance, under the spotlight. Here, at its best, drama stirs something deep within us all. It may be sensed either in a silence or sudden burst of raucous laughter, or glimpsed on the face of another member of the audience- especially when seated in the round. A nerve has been touched, our polished surface has been disturbed, even blown apart - and we are left to pick up the pieces!

Sounding the Depths

We have just completed the fourth of the six arts evenings of our Lent series “Visions in the Wilderness.” Sounding the Depths was the title we gave to the classical concert given by my wife’s new String Quartet, NSQ. They played selections from Haydn’s ‘Seven Last Words’ in the first half and The Ravel String Quartet after the interval. We chose to present the concert in the new Church Hall with the seating arranged in the round. This meant the musicians were very close to their surrounding audience, creating a curious mixture of informality, since they faced in towards each other as in a rehearsal, and a heightened intensity, as we were virtually breathing down their necks. Before the concert began, I explained to the audience that we had chosen to call our Lent Arts Events “Visions in the Wilderness” in order to put a positive spin on what is often regarded as a season of miserable self-denial. I stressed that the wilderness is, both literally and symbolically, a place where we can come to see ourselves and the world with fresh eyes. A wilderness, or desert, is a place stripped bare of all the superfluous, distracting features of everyday life. A place where we are forced to focus on what we may have been subconsciously avoiding for a long time. The great figures in the Bible, Moses, David, and of course Jesus, all experienced visions in the wilderness and came to know the desert as a place of discovery and transformation. There aren’t any deserts in West Sussex, though I have found the South Downs to be a pretty good substitute. However, coming to a concert such as ‘Sounding the Depths’ can have the same profound effect. For over an hour the audience sat without uttering a word. There was nothing to look at other than the strange sawing and swaying of the four musicians, dressed in black, under the glare of the spotlights. The rapt expression on the faces of the rest of the audience across the stage, focussed you back into the centre. Our world, so often cluttered with streams of jumbled words and flickering images had been mercifully reduced to pure sound. Many in the audience closed their eyes for long spells, basking in this welcome release from the daily contortions of the mind. This was especially felt during the wondrous Ravel Quartet, with its free flowing, dream-like phrases and form. It’s extraordinary how much sound just four musicians can make. As the Quartet unfolded, movement by movement, there was a sense of something sublime stirring within each player, as they became part of their instrument, quivering and resonating with a force which held them and us under a deep spell for nearly half an hour. What a profound and mysterious gift is music, when channelled through a brilliant composer like Ravel and such talented performers as these, who have worked away at their instruments for well over a century between them. By the end of the performance seventy people had sounded the depths of their collective unconscious, by tuning in to air waves crackling with the sighs and groans of an inspired composer. We had been drawn together by the skill and sensitivity of four great artists, and discovered a powerful unity expressed in our thunderous applause at the end of the evening. Imagine if those seventy people had tried to find such unity through an hours discussion on some emotive topic. What jarring of minds, what cacophony of voices raised one against another, what jangling music we would make! Indeed, this is the discord we so often create, as we gabble away in the work-place, or our homes, or in the media, and yes, even in church, day by day, week by week. It is for good reason that music, at its best, has been experienced by all the great civilizations as a supreme gift of the Gods. The Church has been enriched across the ages by composers of the calibre of Bach, Haydn and more recently John Taverner. They have revealed a God whose eloquence is beyond words, whose presence is felt most tangibly through abstract sound, through music. Such music unites rather than divides a humanity made in the image of the divine. This is its genius. What a high calling indeed, is that of the musician.

Trojan Women in Surrey!

Today I presented our school production of the Greek Tragedy 'The Trojan Women.' As the audience filed in, to take their seats on all four sides of the stage space, the sound of the sea (timeless symbol of fate) played through the speakers. Six A’ level Theatre Students lay spread-eagled across a large rectangle of bark-chippings and compost representing the desolate Trojan soil in the aftermath of war. The lighting was a dim wash of blue to suggest night. Were these women dressed in bloody robes, asleep or dead? It must have seemed an age for the actresses, as the students filled up the intimate drama studio. Some sat on the floor in front of the front rows of benches, and others were escorted upstairs to the gallery above the stage. It was a packed house! The sound of the sea dissolved into a track from Wellspring - a sublime piece of music improvised by strings. The women slowly rose from the stage, as if rising from their graves and formed a circle around a basic stone altar in the centre. Here with the lights still low, they performed a simple ritual, suggesting a sort of cleansing of their blood-stained robes, rather like that described in the Apocalypse of St. John. This could be interpreted in different ways; a dream, a flash-back to a time before the war, or a revelation of an after-life, for these hapless victims of war. The play by Euripides, was one of the first and most powerful anti-war plays ever written. As the title suggests, the playwright focuses on the most vulnerable victims of war rather than the classical heroic warriors. In that sense the play was ground-breaking at the time, and explains why Euripides did not win prizes at the great theatrical festivals in Athens. His tone was rather too subversive! After this surreal, and uncharacteristically upbeat opening to our interpretation of this timeless tragedy, the drama followed its relentless course, as the Trojans prepared to be deported as slaves by the conquering Greeks. I love watching theatre in the round because you can see every one else’s reaction in the audience. It’s not an easy play for sixth formers to sit through, with its long lamentations and breast-beating angst, but the hundred strong audience tuned into its brooding tone, as though appreciating a piece of late Beethoven! The applause at the end was thunderous! It’s extraordinary that a play written nearly two and a half millennia ago can still resonate with a large group of teenagers at the start of the 21st Century. Young men and women with iphones stuffed into skinny jeans, who rarely, if ever think about religion or politics, or the mystery of suffering, sat in rapt silence for an hour contemplating a world that was both utterly alien, and yet strangely all too familiar with its depiction of the fragility of human happiness, male subjugation of women, humanity’s attempts to make sense of devastating loss. I’ve no idea what this youthful audience may have taken away, other than a certain admiration for their heroic peers on the stage. Our souls are formed from myriad impressions stamped upon our psyche over a life-time. Art, whether through music, image or story often leaves the deepest traces even if we can’t always articulate it at the time. However, I believe the actors in the production have been profoundly affected by working on this play for the last few months. One of the great privileges of directing actors, is their intense receptivity towards you in the moments before a performance. They hang on your every word like soldiers going into battle. This is a pleasing contrast to their quality of attention in the classroom! Today, in the minutes before each of the three performances, we have spoken about huge themes and issues; about what it means to be human in any time or place. We have identified the heroism of the women in this play. Their endurance in the face of suffering, for example. We have discussed the nature of their loss. Loss of identity, of belonging, separation from loved ones, loss of basic freedoms. Enjoying these things, in any age, are what bring us joy, losing them shrivels our souls till we become husks of humanity. The actors who have spent the last three months embodying these truths will certainly take away something profound from this project, apart from a wonderful sense of achievement. The art of acting enables us to experience truth from the inside, as it were. It is to use Aristotle’s phrase cathartic, and thus transformative. I know of no healthier way to engage with the great spiritual themes of life than treading the boards in a play such as this. No wonder the ancient Greeks built huge theatres at the heart of their wonderfully progressive city states. These seventeen year old girls from privileged and relatively sheltered backgrounds have dug deep into their souls to empathize with women so far removed from their own circumstances. As they have done so, they have, albeit vicariously, felt what it’s like to be utterly powerless in the face of gross injustice, experienced the existential bewilderment of sudden and meaningless loss, and most importantly, the capacity of the human spirit to endure, come what may. I am sure they will look upon their fellow humanity, encountered on the news, or in the flesh, in a more compassionate light from now on. It’s time the churches and other institutions learnt a trick from the schools, and embraced drama as a core means of helping its members become more spiritually enlightened and socially integrated. As the great teacher Confucius said: 'I hear, I forget; I see, I remember; I do, I understand.' The Trojan Women is a perfect play for this season of Lent. It reads like the book of Jerhemiah or Lamentations from the Old Testament. It is a play which draws the audience into the bleakest wilderness and shows humanity stripped to its essence. All our illusions about civilized society are laid bare, and we are left like the Trojans, like Jerhemiah, to lament for a world that's lost its way.

Captured Voices

I was gathering together my dozen or so readers for a poetry recital in aid of Amnesty International, when I hit a snag. I needed an immigrant! Well at least one!! Many of the poems I had chosen came from a collection of writings presented by ex-hostage John McCarthy. They are written by victims of torture and state oppression around the world, and the last one I had chosen was titled ‘The Good Immigrant.’ It’s sad, but true, that virtually all the members of my Anglican congregation are white and middle-class, and Horsham in Sussex where I live, is much the same. The poem details the painstaking and often soul destroying process for the refugee of gaining admittance to a country, and it would sound wrong with home-counties vowels! Then Rachel blurted out, 'what about Bartek, Rosemary’s Polish lodger.' At first, Bartek was extremely nervous about the idea. His English is somewhat halting, and the poem is longish. We chatted, and I assured him he would be fine. Rosemary, a teacher, promised to give him all the coaching he needed. I had my immigrant! The day of the recital came, and the readers filed into the church hall for a rehearsal. Fourteen art installations, illustrating the poems, had been erected in the church and hall, rather like The Stations of the Cross. Card board boxes weighted down with bricks and draped with black satin were used to create a plinth, and upon them were placed sculptures crafted by members of the congregation. Some were deliberately basic like a Starbuck's Coffee carton and empty sandwich wrapper placed haphazardly on a copy of The Big Issue. Others were more elaborate or aesthetic, such as a large church candle swathed in chains, reflecting the Amnesty Inernational symbol. The poems were pinned to the satin drapes, so that once they had been read, the audience could wander around the installations and reflect more deeply on their meaning. Many of the readers had not met before so there was a slight tension at having to stand and deliver to one another, as they were summoned to the stage. After all, strange as it seems, public speaking is, with snakes and spiders, one of our great phobias. It probably comes from the intense exposure of being in the spotlight, especially when you are called upon to express strong emotions. It’s fine if you’re used to it, but if your not, something as organic as breathing, or holding a piece of paper, becomes strangely troublesome. As I said Bartek’s poem was the last one, which probably didn’t help his nerves. However this fine figure of a man in his late twenties strode bravely onto the platform and began to speak. No one had met Bartek before apart from me, and Rosemary who had come as chaperone, so when he announced the title of the poem in his thick eastern European brogue, you could sense a strange intensification of mood, as folk looked up from their own readings with anticipation. There had been some excellent recitals by highly accomplished performers, and here was a lad who was struggling a little to get his words out, and find a fluency and rhythm in his voice. Somehow that added even greater poignancy to the poem, especially for lines such as: ‘You have to blend in/ with your surroundings/ To fit in your place/ To lower your eyes/ Or if you can’t do that/ Then learn to lower your expectations. ' The poem concludes with the ironic sentence: 'If you can manage this/ There is a good chance of you being accepted/ But there is also a danger/ You won’t want in. ' After Bartek had read these lines with a gentle but firm tone, there was a silence, and then a spontaneous round of applause from his fellow readers. Not bad for a first rehearsal! I had given most of the readers some kind of encouragement or constructive criticism after their rehearsal, but time had run out and the readers were scuttling away for a bite of supper. As he left, Bartek admitted he had felt stressed, since he had done so little of this before, certainly not in this country. I guess it probably felt a bit like being up before a tribunal to argue your right for citizenship. Bartek confided that he could identify with many of the sentiments of the poet Maria Jastrzebska, from his early days arriving in Britain some years ago. In the hour or so break before the recital, Bartek had gone through the poem on his doorstep while Rosemary had made his supper. She occasionally shouted through the door, ‘I can’t hear you,’ to get him to really release the power of the verse. It certainly did the trick! That evening Bartek was in total control on stage. When he got to the lines ‘You must cover up your strength/ As well as your exhaustion/Except for when it shows your working/ Twice as hard as anyone else,’ his voice cracked slightly, and afterwards he admitted that he had felt a deep connection reading the poem in front of our audience. He had brought some friends, older immigrants along with him, and we all oohed and aaahed about the impact he had made as we celebrated his success. One of the ladies said in an accent like Bartek’s. 'You have to experience, it to express it. ' Perhaps so, perhaps not. Another reader who made a powerful impression on us all, read Ariel Dorfman’s poem, ‘Hope,’ about a father whose son has been taken and tortured by the state and whose ‘…greatest/ Hope Will be to find out/ Next year/That they’re still torturing him/Eight months later/ And he may might could be/ Still alive.’ Davie, a Scot who works as a G. P. at Forde Open Prison, recited these lines with such intensity that it made me wonder about the anguished stories he may have heard in the course of duty, that perhaps subconsciously aroused such passion in him now. The point is, that however they do it, poems inspire empathy. They establish a bond between the poet, his subject, and the reader and then by extension their audience. It is a great gift to pass on, because without it we are left ‘comfortably numb’ and to be pitied, perhaps even more than the victims of torture who are far form comfortable or numb!!! The installations were left up for church the next morning, for the benefit of those who hadn’t managed to make it to the recital. A well meaning warden had initially removed them to the side, to clear a path to the communion rail. I restored them as tactfully as I could to their prominent position at the front, and it seemed to me a fitting symbol that communicants had to negotiate their way through this obstruction on their way to share in the body and blood of yet another victim of state oppression. I hope we got the point. £250 was raised in any case for Amnesty International ,thanks to Bartek, Davie and the rest of us. Rosemary tells me that Bartek is keen to ask his Priest to let him read The Lesson in church occasionally, from now on. I'm sure that would warm God's heart greatly.