Spaceblog

Our Town

2010-01-09T09:42:00.000-08:00

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.

Full Circle

2009-12-19T13:23:00.000-08:00

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.

Joan Baez

2009-12-14T13:27:00.000-08:00

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.

In Praise of Shakespeare

2009-11-30T07:58:00.000-08:00

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.

Choral Evensong on Armistice Day

2009-11-16T10:01:00.000-08:00

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.

End Game at Advent

2009-11-09T06:54:00.000-08:00

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.

The Road

2009-10-31T10:11:00.001-07:00

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.

Whisper of God

2009-10-23T06:57:00.000-07:00

It’s half-term for children and teachers up and down the country. After seven weeks of assemblies, classes, and extra-curricula activities it’s time for a break. In the drama department of my school, fifty or so sixth-formers will feel they’ve most certainly earned one. At the start of term these A’ Level Theatre Studies students were put into groups of between three to six and set the task of devising an original piece of drama from whatever stimulus their particular teacher chose to give them. Although the pieces were to be short, (the exam board stipulates around five minutes per candidate) this in some ways makes it harder since live theatre generally requires sufficient stage-time for a plot to be teased out or characters to be fully developed if it is to have an impact on an audience. Moreover, the project requires the students to work collaboratively with minimal intervention from the teacher. For both teachers and students this part of the drama syllabus feels designed to drive us all bananas or at least turn us against each other for evermore. The teacher is supposed to merely facilitate, acting as ‘a critical friend.’ In effect this role is akin to parenting stroppy teenagers; the students resent your intrusion when they think they’re working well, and then expect you to bail them out at the last minute when it all goes pear-shaped. Nonetheless it is fascinating to observe the group dynamics of each creative family as the problems of any and every community inevitably surface in each tiny microcosmic unit. There are the pushy leaders who try to seize control from the start, the passive ‘passengers’ who seem indifferent to any kind of creative vision and the earnest negotiators seeking to keep all on board. Having seen both the process and product of this kind of project for the best part of twenty years, I have noticed many common traps the students are ensnared by. Perhaps the most typical is the drive to be wildly experimental above all else. Any kind of conventional scene such as two characters interacting with one another in a recognizable setting is thrown out in favour of the weird and wacky. While one wants to applaud this attempt at originality, such innovation often leave an audience bewildered and thus ultimately disengaged. Moreover, the students obsession with style can mean a lack of substance and the teacher inevitably ends up asking them: ‘yes, but what’s it all supposed to be about?’ As their teacher, you long for them to find and trust their own creative voice rather than pretend to be cleverer than they are.

However, once in a while a group manages to really gel and create a piece of theatre which resonates profoundly with an audience of their peers, parents and the staff. This year two attractive girls and a strapping lad all wearing orange jump suits faced their audience and welcomed them to their unit three devised piece. They then went on to explain their mission:

“It’s not really a play; we haven’t got a set or scenes…it’s just things we think and feel, and things you think and feel.’

Now of course this approach could have been disastrous leaving the audience squirming in their seats at such embarrassing self-indulgence. However, in the ensuing twenty minutes one could sense that strange many-headed monster which fills up an auditorium becoming increaingly inspired and moved by the group's raw honesty expressed through profound and witty visual metaphors together with some fresh and unpretentious dialogue. One of the girls, Jess, pedalled furiously on an exercise bike on the right of the stage observed intently by Max who stood near by. As she pedals she explains:

“ I want to be one of the fishes in the pond…not necessarily a big fish, maybe just a different colour…a lighter colour..no..a brighter colour one with a stripe or a little…a little…a little…spot. Just something different. Because if I had that, then every body would believe in me and see that I can do this. They would look at me and say. ‘look at that fish with the bright stripe…wow!’ And I could just be this fish, you know? Just be me.”

Max then asks her how much further she has to go to get to where she’s aiming for and Jess gets off the bike and measures from the wheel to the edge of the stage and discovers to her despair that she has moved nowhere. “Oh” says Max, with evident concern for her. "Come and take a rest."
The other girl, Betsy hadn’t even scripted her part, but she brillintly improvised a series of monologues addressed to the audience in which she babbled incoherently about things she clearly hoped we would be impressed by: getting boys, bunking off school, ‘crashing’ parties and clubs. At the height of each excitble rant she would suddenly freeze, look at what she was wearing and rapidly exit in horror at her inadequate choice of clothing. The audience found this hysterical, due to Betsy’s delivery and timing and perhaps because we recognized a grotesque image of ourselves through the way we can fall at lightning speed from sky-high confidence to cringing vulnerability . However, by her final entrance at the end of the play, Betsy was only able to make unintelligible noises at the audience like a character from a Samuel Beckett play or The Goons. This again was both farcical and finally moving as she stared out to the auditorium and gingerly confessed, ‘I’ve got nothing to say,’ before quietly asking, ‘ Can I not just be?’ This was intensified further when the other two performers drew alongside Betsy and echoed this final question as the lights slowly faded to a blackout.

It’s always hard to analyse why a piece of art resonates with a particular audience, but in this case it may have had something to do with what I was saying earlier about the striving of so many of this group's peers (present among the audience) to devise a piece of ultra-sophisticated drama throughout the past few weeks. It may also have reflected a recognition of how hollow all our attempts at expression sometimes seem either in art or life: ‘full of sound and fury signifying nothing’ to quote Macbeth at his most despairing. I think, above all the final question 'can I not just be?' reflected a yearning we all felt to let all our strivings cease especially after such a busy few weeks. When the light had gone there was that wonderful silence in which you could feel some deep truth had dawned on us. It was a shame that the recording of a kazoo playing some jaunty circus music cut in so suddenly as I felt the audience wanted to bathe in the darkness and quiet of the theatre for longer before applauding. Nonetheless I left the auditorium exhilarated by the student’s work. All the best art leads us to the silence which brings a deeper realization of the human condition. It is a silence where we can, if we’re open, hear the whisper of God. On reflection, as I begin my half-term break, I think He may have been answering that final petition with a firm but gentle 'Yes!'

Photographic Exhibition

2009-10-16T02:58:00.000-07:00

I was beginning to get a little anxious about how we were going to get the best use from our new community hall for the forthcoming annual arts festival at St. John’s. The new academic year was upon us and I had to get the publicity out as the festival happens in mid-October. Last year when the hall had just been completed, it became a very effective exhibition space for local artists. We installed a picture rail in the hall and adjoining meeting rooms allowing us to hang an extensive exhibition including a range of subject-matter, styles and media. This not only complimented the other events, such as the concerts and dramatic production I had directed, but helped create a very impressive foyer for these performances. It was such a success that we put in some architectural spotlights later in the year when we held a second exhibition during Lent. However exhibitions take some organizing and I do not have a long list of contacts of local artists. I decided somewhat impulsively that perhaps we should have a photographic exhibition instead. I know very little about photography, nor what an exhibition on this scale might involve. However, churches are wonderful sources for net-working and after a couple of emails I had my man! Jeremy has been on the fringes of the church for a number of years, but I have always found him to be something of a jack of all trades who has come to the rescue when we have needed help with sound or lighting for a number of shows. He is also a very gifted amateur photographer and one of those characters who makes things happen and ensures they are done with flair. It so happens that Jeremy has a very impressive website of his work including travel photography, flora and fauna and an inspiring series of more abstract work. We sat down over coffee with another mover and shaker from the church and began to plot! We discovered there were a few other excellent photographers among the congregation including a young graduate who was studying in Brighton. She had a ready-made display of fascinating portraiture to contribute from her AS photography course at the local sixth-form college. In addition, Jeremy had the idea of including a digital display projected onto a large screen in one of the meeting rooms. We decided to invite anyone from the congregation and their friends to email their best shots to Jeremy so he could create a slide-show which could loop round and round throughout the weekend. Finally, we borrowed an extensive set of screens from the local council which meant we could mount smaller prints where they could be encountered at closer proximity and which would give the hall space a sort of café atmosphere. A private view was held earlier in the week and Jeremy and the graduate Alex Best were interviewed about their work with additional questions coming from the floor.

The exhibition was enjoyed by many people from the local community including the three hundred or so folk who had come to the performances over the weekend. There were several, like me, who were drawn into the side-room to enjoy the digital display. We had put sofas and soft chairs in front of the screen creating the feel of an intimate cinema. It became, moreover, a sanctuary from the main hall with the giant images slowly and silently dissolving every five seconds or so; it also, for me at least, became a form of prayer. The loop took the best part of an hour and I was surprised that I had stayed the course, as I do not make a habit of looking at still images for any length of time. Yet I found myself to be strangely energised by the end of the show. I had been transported around the world from Sussex, to Nepal, Antarctica, the Falklands, Cape Town and many other foreign lands. I had laughed at the silly posturing of penguins, gasped at the power and majesty of landscapes, identified with the deep-set, soulful expressions of venerable Nepalese natives. As I reflected on the slide-show in the following week I was able to identify some of the elements that had contributed to the spiritual dimensions of the experience. Each image reflected in some way a moment of thoughtful response from human beings to God’s endless revelation of the fascinating complexity and diversity of life through all which surrounds us. Taking the photograph involved a slowing down and waiting, a contemplation of an image, finding an interesting angle on it and a way of framing the picture. It was also a way of remembering, appreciating, and perhaps sharing moments of significance or meaning along our pilgrimage through life. I was talking with one of the photography teachers at our school the other day and he remarked that a photograph often tells you as much about the person taking it as their subject. In that case each image was potentially a moment of self-revelation and I suppose that is partly why photography at its best is an art form capable of moving us very powerfully. Thomas Merton, one of the great mystics of the twentieth century was a very keen and expert photographer and it was central to his profound, contemplative spirituality. Although Jeremy has, as I said, been on the fringes of the Church he had taught us much through this exhibition. Perhaps it is those on the edge of things who often find the most interesting angle. That is certainly true for the photographer and the artist in general.

Young Musicians Showcase

2009-10-13T23:50:00.000-07:00

Just half an hour before the Young Musicians Showcase, the final event at our weekend arts festival, my 14 year old daughter Charlotte popped her head around the living room door. Her face was pale and her eyes were glistening: ‘Mr Head has died,’ she said. The head of History at the girl’s comprehensive had been involved in a terrible car crash earlier that week and we knew his prospects were grim. Nonetheless, it was still a horrible shock for Charlotte and her sister Katy to receive the email that confirmed their fears. I was with some new friends when she told me this news and Charlotte and Katy needed to get over to the church to tune up for the concert. I mumbled something about saying a prayer before the event started but wasn’t sure this was quite appropriate. One of the performers in the showcase had thought up a much better idea. When it was her turn to play, seventeen year old Lorna Nye took to the stage with her cello, sat down and said: ‘I’d like to dedicate this to Stephen Head.’ She then proceeded to play “Elegie” by Faure as she had rehearsed. Lorna had been a pupil at Tanbridge House School until a year ago and together with many pupils and staff from the school held him in very high regard. Like all the musicians who played that afternoon Lorna played with great technique and sensitivity, but her dedication before her piece added a whole extra dimension to the showcase.

Earlier that morning I had spoken at our thanksgiving service for the arts festival. My theme was the importance of festivals for the flourishing of a community. I read the passage from the Book of Revelation which describes all creation gathered around the throne of God singing the words which inspired one of the great choruses from Handel’s Messiah. ‘Worthy is the lamb that was slain to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honour and glory and blessing!’ I asked the congregation to consider this eschatological scene as a magnificent arts festival just like the one we had been enjoying over the weekend. I highlighted the great tradition of festivals and celebrations recorded in the Bible from the inauguration of Passover which annually marked the Israelites deliverance from slavery in Egypt, to the regular celebration of the Eucharist in the early Church. I suppose I was asserting that the language and rituals of celebration were the default position for Christians and people of faith in good times and bad. This is not to escape from grim reality or live indulgently but to remember the eternal perspective which the passage in Revelation offers: the wonder, mystery and above all sacredness of life calls forth unceasing praise and celebration from all living things over and above all else. Furthermore, I suggested that the arts are a God-given language to enable us to celebrate appropriately. From the building of the Tabernacle in the desert, and onward throughout the ages in the Judeo-Christian tradition, artists and craftsmen have used their gifts to lead their religious community in celebration and festivity or lament and mourning. We need poets, composers and performers to help us to access and release the intensity of thought and feeling within us in order to express ourselves eloquently before God especially corporately.

The other point about festivals and celebrations I made that morning was that they provided a forum for initiating younger members into the rites and traditions of the adult community. According to the book of Deuteronomy, Moses instructed the fledgling Israelite community to teach their children all the laws that the Lord God had commanded them to follow. One of the most effective ways of doing this would be through the rituals of annual festivals and celebrations. In the service that morning, the worship was led by an all-age orchestra. Lads of twelve or so stood on the rostra from last night’s performance playing brass instruments of various kinds. Girls of a similar age and younger sat in the string section next to seasoned musicians from the congregation. We are too quick to segregate children off from the adult community. There is a place for Sunday school and any other kind of schools for that matter, but we should look for opportunities for children to participate in and even lead all age community events such as this. Lorna’s gesture later that day at the concert was a perfect example of just how much they can contribute. Through her simple and seemingly spontaneous words and subsequent playing of “Elegie” Lorna dignified and magnified the Young Musicians Showcase and affirmed that even in the bleakest circumstances we may continue to celebrate. Moreover the children raised £165 from the concert which will be donated to projects in the developing world. I’m not sure what impact Lorna’s words had on my daughters or the other children at the concert, but I imagine they gave them a sense that they can ultimately respond with eloquence to whatever life throws at them. There are few lessons more important than that.

The Messiah Experience

2009-10-02T03:03:00.000-07:00

A bright-eyed ‘evangelist’ called Gareth Malone has been winning over the most unlikely devotees to the ‘gospel' of community singing over the past few years in front of TV audiences of millions. He’s ventured into a boys comprehensive in Leicestershire, a run-down estate in South Oxhey, Hertfordshire persuading the most reluctant singers to join with their peers and discover the power of choral song. It’s made compulsive viewing as the cameras have recorded Gareth’s determination to help shuffling, self-conscious school-boys find their voice as they’ve rehearsed for the big concert at the Albert Hall. In the last series it was particularly moving to witness members of his choir from South Oxhey reduced to tears of pride and joy as they listened to their recording of a Beatles song at Abbey Road studios. I suppose what these ordinary folk have discovered, is how powerfully expressive they can be when they come together as one and respond to the inspirational guidance of a great leader such as the plucky young Gareth. The people of South Oxhey had apparently felt themselves to be a pretty worthless and insignificant lot up till then, but Gareth’s idea of staging an open-air concert on their vast common, galvanized them to work together to ensure it was a success. Perhaps the series has proved so moving because a huge choir of all ages and backgrounds like this is such a potent metaphor for the potential of a community when it is governed with passion, wisdom, and sensitivity. This is made all the more poignant at a time when so many people feel increasingly alienated from a society led by politicians who fiddle their expenses, or bankers and businesses that drive the nation to the brink of economic collapse through insatiable avarice.

In our own small way we have been following Gareth’s example at St. John’s Church as we have prepared for our second annual arts festival in Broadbridge Heath, West Sussex. (A Space for the Arts). On Saturday 10th October we will present “The Messiah Experience” in the church. This will feature a selection of Handel’s music from his great Oratorio sung by a choir pulled together from the local congregation including one or two professionals who have sung at Glyndebourne alongside several, including myself, for whom the whole choral tradition with its weird vocal warm ups and endless note-bashing is still a relatively novel experience. We will be joined on the platform by a community gospel choir largely drawn from the Catholic church in nearby Horsham. They will be singing funkier contemporary settings of the classic libretto accompanied by a band formed from the local community and led by a dynamic singer from our congregation who has much experience working with community choirs of all ages. In more recent rehearsals we have warmed up together at the start of the evening and reunited at the end to perform a little of what we have been rehearsing throughout the session to one another. Its great to encounter a whole new group of people through the immediacy of song rather than the tedium of social niceties. Anglicans have fused with Catholics, classically trained musicians with Gospel singers.
I am singing bass in the three songs the classical choir are offering including the rousing “Glory to God” and triumphal “The Hallelujah Chorus.” Its been fascinating to experience such familiar pieces being deconstructed by an excellent musician from Horsham, as she’s guided each section of the choir through their parts. Aside from getting on top of the melodies and timing the entries of your part (while others are singing something totally different) there’s the challenge of forming and placing the precise vowel-sounds which create the resonance Handel was after. The process is really painstaking initially and you wonder if you will ever master it individually, let alone corporately. It’s wonderful when reinforcements arrive unexpectedly to bolster your section. In an early rehearsal three novice choristers were struggling with our bass line in “Glory to God” when Alex, a doctor, pitched up after a long day at work. This experienced and confident singer instantly transformed us as we clustered around him like tiny ducklings following mother! It’s truly magical when each section has mastered their part and you put it all together. You’re able to hold your own line and sing it with abandon whilst hearing the whole score swirling all around you as if you are caught up in the air with the angels on that first Christmas Eve.
It’s 250 years since Handel’s death. He died just five months before his Oratorio was first performed in a provincial church like ours (though considerably larger). Up till then “The Messiah” had mainly been performed in theatres and concert halls. That first performance in 1759 in a church in Leicestershire was also part of a festival organized by the local congregation. It cost five shillings and attracted two thousand people, though the rector estimated that around twenty-five thousand folk from the surrounding countryside jammed the roads into town eager to be part of the festival in some way. Accommodation over the weekend was so scarce that the Earl of Devonshire had to take a room with the local tanner. Since then The Messiah or parts of it at least have been sung by church and community choirs of varying standards all over the world proclaiming “good news” to generation after generation in “The Hallelujah Chorus.” We will do well to get 200 into our much smaller provincial church at a cost of £10 a ticket (not a bad increase considering inflation over a quarter of a millennium). All profits will be ploughed into our newly formed Space Arts Trust ensuring we can continue to pay the odd soloist from Glyndebourne and professional instrumentalists to make sure we do justice to works such as this for many years to come.

Back to School

2009-09-18T01:18:00.000-07:00

As every parent knows, September and the start of the new academic year is a shock to the system, especially if both parents are teachers themselves. After several weeks of lying in of a morning, it’s back into the old routine; up with the lark to make sandwiches, get breakfast on the table and in our case chivvy the girls to do an hour of music practice before they leave for school. As I write this, I can hear Charlotte’s moody ‘Moonlight Sonata’ on the piano fighting Katy’s wailing violin from the adjoining room. Though they don’t always appreciate it, they’re fortunate to have a mother who can dart from one place to the other to keep them at it.

Like most Christian parents, Rachel and I have tried to encourage the girls to squeeze in a short time of prayer and reflection to the start of the day, but to be honest that has often been a struggle. One faithful God-parent has sent Bible notes from time to time, but Charlotte has rarely incorporated them into her daily life. We’ve also tried to persuade them to read good literature since they were old enough to do so for themselves, and we’ve certainly had more success over the years with this campaign. However, the telly and the computer are always a bigger draw after a long day at school for obvious reasons.

Nonetheless, in the last six months we have found a way of killing two birds with one stone! It began by reading a chapter or so of the Bible at the breakfast table. This was endured rather than enjoyed, to be honest, until I began reading them an excellent adaptation of Pilgrim’s Progress by children’s author Geraldine McCaughrean. It’s an excellently written and beautifully illustrated abridgement of Bunyan’s original novel about Christian’s quest for the Celestial City and it has helped us to establish breakfast reflections as a permanent feature through reading a short passage from a novel each day.

Since then we have read ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Animal Farm,’ but the most popular by far has been ‘To Kill a Mocking Bird’ by Harper Lee. Was there ever a better book to impart the essence of Christian values to children, or maybe even more so to adults? Indeed, in the novel we see very clearly the tragic ignorance of the adult community through the eyes of eight year old Scout as she learns the facts of life from her wise and humane father, Atticus. This quietly heroic lawyer stands against the prejudice of a whole town to defend the Negro, Tom Robinson against charges of rape, but beyond that he gently but firmly combats his children’s innate impulse to dismiss others they have as yet barely understood. Toward the end of the story Scout, the narrator, sums up her father’s philosophy: “Atticus was right. One time he said you never really knew a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them.” However, good novels like all the best art don’t impart values by preaching, but by enabling just what Atticus exhorts his children to do; they get us to see a vivid picture of the world through the multiple perspectives of their cast of characters and thus to recognize how complex morality can be. Through identifying and empathizing with a range of characters, we perhaps become more forgiving of ourselves and others. Above all good novels are able to transform us through stimulating our imagination as we construct the writer’s world through the building blocks of their language.

So for now the Bible has been left on the shelf at breakfast time, as we work through some modern classics. Yet, in truth, this sacred book is really a whole library of novels in itself, interspersed with much poetry (liturgical and prophetic), proverbial wisdom, a sequence of letters, and that strange apocalyptic work which rounds off the entire body of literature in the cannon. In my own times of reflection, I have begun to read ‘The David Story,’ Robert Alter’s acclaimed translation of the two books of Samuel in the Old Testament which tell the epic story of King David’s rise to power in Israel around 1,000 BC. In his introduction Alter encourages the reader to regard the telling of the story in much the same way as one would approach one of Shakespeare’s great history plays. In other words we should avoid the mistake of seeing them just as a chronicling of events from the life of King David in order to preserve a meticulous record of Israel’s history, but rather recognize the great literary technique employed to draw the reader into the intriguing world of court life in Israel at the time, and above all the inner lives of the protagonists. This craft of story-telling he argues enables us to explore the profound political and spiritual themes which interested the writer and to place ourselves in the shoes of the key players like Saul, Samuel, David and so forth. Moreover, some of the episodes like the slaying of Goliath, for example, clearly draw on universal narrative features such as the idea of an unknown warrior stepping up to deliver a King and his subjects from a monster in response to the reward of a princess. This literary model was later used in many of the folkloric tales of European literature. In literary terms the towering figure of Goliath takes on the symbolic significance of the gigantic obstacles we often face to put our faith in the living God. The figure of David who discards the borrowed armour from his King reminds us that “the Lord does not save by sword and spear,” but through our trust in his providence. In the same way Shakespeare’s dramatization of the battle of Agincourt may have taken some license with history, but through his characterization of ‘King Harry’ in the play, he reveals universal truths of the human condition which teach us much the same message as that of the Goliath narrative. Discussing the book of Samuel in his introduction, Alter states’ “the writer feels free to invent an inner language for the characters, to give their dialogues revelatory shape, to weave together episodes and characters with a fine mesh of recurrent motifs and phrases and analogies of incident, and to define the meaning of events through allusion, metaphor and symbol. The writer does all this not to fabricate history but in order to understand it.”

The vicar of my local church recently lamented the Biblical illiteracy of contemporary Western culture. I think this is partly because the Church has unwittingly turned one of the great literary masterpieces of all time into something it was never intended to be; a rather dry book of rules. Until we recover the magnificent literary dimensions of the Bible in the way Alter suggests my girls will perhaps opt to leave it on the shelf to gather dust. In the meantime we will shortly move onto another American classic, at breakfast: ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’

Greenbelt

2009-09-03T02:49:00.000-07:00

For my family, like many others who make the annual pilgrimage to the Cheltenham racecourse at the end of August, The Greenbelt Festival is one of the high-points of the year. As a teacher whose life is structured by the academic year, it comes at just the right time as I take a deep breath before plunging into the furious current of the new school curriculum. It is an extraordinary event which includes a breath-taking range of literary and arts events for all ages, talks on hot topics from climate-change to the Palestinian occupation, to sexuality and spirituality. It exists above all to explore the relationship between faith, the arts and social justice and thus nurture the spirituality of thousands of Christians year after year who participate. This was the 36th festival in fact. The Greenbelt experience was beautifully encapsulated in an article by one of this year’s key contributors Andy Tate, a lecturer from Lancaster University. “ For an inveterate chatter-box like me, the plethora of opportunities to drink tea and gabble endlessly about music, books and ideas is very heaven…Greenbelt has always existed on ‘the dangerous edge of things.’. it continues to wrestle with issues of faith and justice and to recognize that good questions are more important than easy answers.”

I am invariably challenged and inspired by the many great speakers who are invited to Greenbelt such as the late, great John O’ Donohue, an Irish poet and mystic who wrote the best-selling Anam Cara. I remember lolling on the grass and laughing in the sunshine as he held-forth in that inimitable Celtic brogue a couple of years ago. This time, however I was struck more than ever with the thought that no amount of discussion or analysis of spirituality and the arts can match the thing itself. There is, I suppose, that moment when we need to stop our chatter, and open our spirits to something more sublime if we are to enter deeply into the presence of the living God. The arts at their best can be for us at such times a form of prayer leading us like Moses up the mountain into “the cloud of unknowing.” This is the place where the air is somehow thinner, our breathing changes, and wonder is stirred as we see the world with fresh eyes. There were three arts events at Greenbelt this year which had something of this effect on me drawing me into what the festival organisers poetically termed ‘the long now.’

On Saturday morning we all went to see No Nonsense Theatre Company’s dramatization of the Old Testament story of Ruth which is about an old woman’s return to her homeland in a time of famine. This innovative drama group had developed their initial ideas for this production through a series of work-shops with economic migrants in the north-west of England. Since the company wanted to keep the play as accessible as possible for these women who had contributed their ideas during the planning stages, they told the story using masks and puppets against an evocative recording of middle-eastern music especially composed for the production. The masks like all the design elements of the show were beautifully crafted to bring the world of the characters vividly alive. Masks distil the essence of a stage character just as a painting does, by capturing a fundamental attitude in the features of the mask which is then heightened through the physicality of the actor. So, far example, the essential dignity and kindness of Boaz, the farmer who feeds and finally marries Ruth at the end of the story, was graphically illustrated in a way that goes far beyond words through the wide set features of the mask and the upright, rooted posture of the actor. I was struck as I looked round the all-age audience how attentively the young children were following really poignant moments in the drama. Before the Reformation and the Protestant Church’s preoccupation with The Word of God, the so-called common folk would engage with the stories of the Bible through the frescos on the walls of their places of worship. Sometimes when we strip away words we behold the beauty of human gestures as if for the first time and the meaning of the story comes into fresh focus. When Ruth silently receives a small sack of grain from Boaz after she has scrabbled in vain for the gleanings in his field, she notices there are some words embroidered across it in black letters. As the masked face angles to read them we see they spell KINDNESS. Nothing more needed to be said.

By Sunday afternoon, I was beginning to feel somewhat dizzy through the combination of the crowds of festival-goers, intense seminars and the constant noise that is an inevitable part of Greenbelt. It was time to seek sanctuary in one of the rooms in the Grandstand set aside for an exhibition called ‘Visionaries’-working in the margins. This was put together for the festival by Wallspace who run an independent gallery in the 18th century church of All Hallows on the Wall in London. Visionaries in this context referred to two kinds of work; that of the dreamer who attempts to depict another form of perceived reality in parallel with the material, everyday world and secondly, a more prophetic vision, a necessary critique of life and institutions as they are, in favour of a vision of how they might be or should be. As I began to look at the paintings I began to slow down. I realized I needed to forget about the time-table of seminars which animated the crowds below and that I had to switch-off whichever side of the brain is activated by theological conundrums. I needed to awaken to the language of colour, line and form. What a relief! I was also aware how I was inclined to systematically work my way through the gallery as though reading a book from cover to cover, or making my way to the local store for a pint of milk. This doesn’t really make much sense in a gallery since each painting is a world in itself inviting us to lose ourselves within its frame and leave behind our linear lives with their notion of getting things done. Would it really matter if I only beheld one painting for the rest of the afternoon if it so captivated me? As I yielded to process of contemplation I was wonderfully refreshed by the exhibition though I sense I have much to learn about appreciating the spiritual power of the visual arts. Looking now at a postcard of one of the paintings from the exhibition, ‘Downland Discourse’ (above) I am aware how the artist, Noel White, invites the spectator to turn away from the devilish world of wild, frenzied activity and walk instead the winding sun-lit path in the company of the iconic saint on the left. At first glance the painting seems rather simplistic with the crude division of the landscape into colour and black and white. However, the saint is dressed in the same grey colour as the demonic world on the right of the image, whereas the devil tones in with the colourful side of the painting. The man in the middle who we are presumably asked to identify with, is drawn initially toward the seductive figure of the devil, but the artist has opened a window, as it were, for us to perceive the darkness and danger of what the demon promises so theatrically . The muted figure of the saint does not wave his arms around but walks quietly by our side. If we can pull ourselves away from the dazzling demon on our right shoulder, we will find a glorious paradise of rest and renewal symbolized by the leaping gazelles, embracing couple and bird in flight across the green meadows. The painting is in fact an icon, calling us to prayer.

Late on Sunday evening I took our tired girls to listen to their Mum playing selections from the work of one of the great spiritual composers of our time, Sir John Tavener with the excellent Greenbelt orchestra assembled by Harry Napier and conducted by the admirable Scott Stroman. Tavener’s music is inspired by the theology and liturgical traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church which he joined in the late seventies. The concert was staged in one of the vast conference halls from which all the seats had been removed which meant that many of the audience could stretch out on the carpeted floor below the stage. The house lights were dimmed leaving just a pinky glow bouncing off the high ceiling of the hall. This created the appropriate atmosphere of a vigil which many of the selections were originally intended for. For my children the music acted more as a lullaby and they slept through much of their mother’s heroics. Since many of the pieces were in homage to Mary the mother of God, that was perhaps exactly the right response for these worn out girls! The soloist was the cellist Matthew Forbes whose playing and instrument responded beautifully to the intense devotional mood evoked by the score. Perhaps music such as this is the most transcendent of all the arts drawing us beyond words and even images into silence and finally sleep. I left Greenbelt, as ever, ready for another year.

Bible Studies in the Sun

2009-08-22T07:55:00.000-07:00

On “Desert Island Discs” guests are allowed to take a copy of the Bible along with their selected music to help them survive as castaways. One suspects that many of them would leave the “good book” to slowly disintegrate at the bottom of their sea-chest while they relived their past through their nostalgic melodies, lounging on their make-shift hammock under the palm trees. For many of the guests of Richmond Holidays, however, exploring the Christian scriptures is at the heart of their Greek island experience over the summer holidays. Rachel and I were thrilled to be invited to lead the evening meetings for guests at the Zefiros Beach Hotel on Samos for two weeks in August, and our girls certainly didn’t complain when we took them too!
During the rest of the day the guests can use the excellent water-front facilities and learn to sail or wind-surf and there are day excursions to key Biblical sites such as the island of Patmos where St. John received the revelation of the apocalypse, or the ancient city of Ephesus where St. Paul established one of the early Christian communities. The aim of the holiday is to provide both spiritual, as well as physical, restoration and to cultivate a rich sense of community among the guests at the hotel.
During the first week, I gave a series of talks on the story of Adam and Eve in the opening book of the Christian scriptures. I wanted to emphasize in particular the stark contrast between God’s essential creativity as he fashions a world and its inhabitants from nothing, and the ultimate struggle of the male and female to emulate this wonderful free-flowing artistry despite being made in the image of their creator. I tried to make a link between the Christian’s ongoing quest to return to God after their exile from Eden with our struggle to tap into our vast creative potential which is embedded within the depths of our being. After each talk, Rachel and I performed short dramatisations I had written based on the Eden narrative, including a speech in which a five hundred year old Adam admits to his mid-life crisis as he looks back on the early days in the garden. For the final talk of that first week I leap-frogged to the end of the Bible to explore God’s second creation, the New Jerusalem, the Holy City, which emerges from the skies at the end of time. Here one finds a community redeemed from the pain of the past and liberated to enjoy at last the fruit from the tree of life which now grows on the banks of the river flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb. I suggested that much of the imagery of this passage reflects a community which is inspired by the wonder of creativity which brings healing and wholeness to all. Rachel played Massenet’s “Meditation” after this talk to provide an opportunity for deep reflection on this.
In the second week I gave a sequence of talks on the seven last words from The Cross. I wanted to emphasize just how resonant the most apparently innocuous line such as “I am thirsty” (the fourth ‘word’ Christ uttered) might be for us today. Each evening I finished with one of the sonnets I had written on these words for Good Friday earlier this year. Rachel introduced these with a few bars from Ernest Bloch’s “Abodah” a composition which was written for the Jewish festival of Yom Kippur. The last talk explored Christ’s dying words recorded by St. Luke; “into Your hands I commit my spirit.” I made the point that these words were characteristic of the one who entrusted himself to the unknown from an early age, one who embraced adventure and continually took risks. I emphasised how essential such an attitude was for the artist, too:

“As an artist, whether as a singer or an actor, a writer or director of theatre, I am aware of the frequent blocks and barriers which inhibit the flow of my creative energy. The mind can be terribly censorious, my imagination can be stubbornly sluggish, my body and voice are often tense and less expressive than they might be. To be effective as an artist, I need to continually work to remove these blocks and barriers and that can be quite a technical process. Beyond this, however, it is about taking risks; it is about trusting myself, trusting my material, and yes, ultimately trusting God. As I start each creative venture I can say with Jesus: ‘into Your hands I commit my Spirit.’”

What is true for the artist is also true for the aspiring Saint. Our fear of the unknown, our fear of failure and looking foolish can seriously stunt both our artistic and spiritual growth as we timidly remain within the shallow waters of experience. However, if we can manage to live with our fears and even befriend them, we may learn as Christ did to venture further out and even still the storms. Those of us who got into a dinghy or onto a surf-board over these past few days on Samos discovered something of the literal truth of this, too.
The Bible is indeed an essential item for either the short or long-term castaway. However, it should not be thrown into the trunk as an after-thought, nor read without taking a very deep-breath indeed; for as well as providing comfort for the disturbed, it swill surely disturb the comfortable.

Riding Lights

2009-08-22T07:52:00.000-07:00

With the beginning of the holidays at the end of July there is the opportunity for the artistic soul to enrol on creative summer courses. Schools are increasingly finding it difficult to carve out sufficient time in the academic year for extra-curricula plays and concerts, so a residential course in the performing arts elsewhere, can be a really important milestone in a child’s education not to mention an adult’s. Our younger daughter Katy (12), a budding violinist, went to Suffolk for a chamber-music course for string players with Pro-Corda, and our elder daughter Charlotte joined my mother and myself for The Riding Lights Theatre School which takes place in Yorkshire every year. Riding Lights was founded by three graduates in the late seventies. It grew out of the life and mission of St. Michael le Belfrey’s Church presenting punchy, comic sketches on the streets of York and beyond. Since then it has evolved into a highly respected company with its own theatre in the city and a theatre-in-education troupe, Roughshod, who take shows into schools and prisons throughout the year. The summer school is arguably the highpoint of the company’s year as they host around 120 students from 14 to 80 plus who have enrolled on one of the various drama courses on offer. My mother who is 81 was the eldest person this year and like me she had signed up for the “Behind the Lines” course which looks at the crafty art of playwriting. We had also come to perform the one-act play about Christina Rossetti begun on the course the previous year by my friend and colleague Simon Machin. Charlotte had opted for the Riding Lights Express course in which a small group of 14-18 year olds perform an abridged version of a classic text. This year it was to be “Murder in the Cathedral” by T.S. Eliot which dramatizes the martyrdom of Thomas a Beckett using a chorus of women in the style of a Greek Tragedy. So there were three generations of my family at the school and I had a strong sense of things being passed down the line. I’m sure my mother felt it more profoundly still. However, she had not really performed on the stage since her mid-sixties when she brought her excellent career to a premature close somewhat ingloriously by appearing in the “Mousetrap” in the West End. She was as I suggested in an earlier chapter very nervous about playing the poet Christina Rossetti in Simon’s new play “Poison in the Blood,” despite my attempts to defuse the pressure by reminding her it was really just to show-case Simon’s work. The trouble is of course, live performance is, well, live and dangerous and if you freeze or forget your lines there are no safety nets unlike in films were you can simply start again. Some of the greatest actors of the age have fled from stage-work unable to cope with the intense vulnerability of being under the spotlight. The actor has to bare their soul in public and express intense feelings on stage in a way which seems natural and unforced. This ideally require the performer to be very centred and relaxed in spite of the pressure to please the sea of faces peering through the darkness at the brightly lit stage. This is one of the many tough paradoxes for the actor which has taxed practitioners and drama theorists from Stanislavski to the brilliant Polish director Grotowski throughout the last century. Oscars and Oliviers are awarded to a lucky few each year who manage this art with particular flair and integrity on the bigger stages or screens throughout the profession. My mother never won a ‘gong’ in her half a century on the stage, but she has always won praise from critics, colleagues and audiences whether delivering the witty dialogue of Noel Coward or identifying with one of Arthur Miller’s tragic stage characters in plays such as Death of a Salesman.” Acting is certainly a craft one has to work at, but it is first and foremost a gift from God. My mother knew she wanted to act well before she had heard of Stanislavski at RADA. when she felt the force of Joan of Arc’s passionate speeches as a school girl and knew she had found her vocation. Seventy years later she performed the dying poet Rossetti with the same intensity and moved the audience to tears at the Tom Stoppard Theatre in Pocklington. It was a pleasure to share the stage with her. A few days later Charlotte shone through on the same stage in her play and perhaps she will follow her grandmother into the theatre. The best actors must learn to become extremely vulnerable, both in rehearsal and performance, if they are to profoundly touch their audience. Grotowski saw his actors as a kind of priest and understood their performance to be a form of religious sacrifice. The vocations of both priest and performer demand no less than everything over a life-time if they are to be followed with integrity. Neither calling should be heeded lightly although this is easily forgotten in our celebrity culture. I think my mother discovered the truth of this all over again this summer.

The Plucky Publican: Parables on the BBC

2009-07-14T10:25:00.000-07:00

There has been much controversy of late concerning the BBC. There were the scandals about the game-show prizes which appeared to have been rigged in some cases, and then more recently there was the outrage at Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand’s crude insensitivity toward actor Andrew Sachs on one of their so-called comedy programmes. Newspapers and the general public have begun to question the integrity of one of the great pillars of the media and entertainment industry. Many bemoan the deluge of reality TV programmes on all stations, and despite the huge choice available through the digital and satellite channels and the sharper high definition pictures as a result of advanced technology, there is a growing disillusionment with the black box in the corner of the lounge. There is, moreover, a concern that the BBC in particular has sold out in order to compete for viewing figures with the commercial channels. Whatever the truth of these allegations, there is no doubt that BBC drama at its best can still profoundly move mass audiences either with lavish period pieces or more gritty contemporary fare.
The first episode of ‘The Street’ starring Bob Hoskins as a plucky landlord who stands up to a local gangster, Miller, was an example of the latter. The play came across as a modern parable about courage, integrity, and parenthood and reminded me of the power of simple story-telling to bring home timeless truths more eloquently than any sermon or lecture by priest or politician. How we need such parables today! Christ was the master of the short story according to the Gospel writers, captivating his large and varied audiences by the Lake of Galilee with stories of good Samaritans, prodigal sons and foolish virgins. In a culture without TV, the internet, or even newspapers his topical tales did much to shape the mind-set of his local community and have since reached millions more across the ages; broadcasting at its best one might say! Of course the power of a story is in the telling as much as the content and Hoskins is a great craftsman of this with a face and voice that are utterly mesmerising. He plays Paddy, a landlord who runs the greyhound pub and his teenage family with the same admirable mix of firm authority and paternalistic care. When he catches a young lad, Callum, smoking in the pub loos, an offence which would cost his pub £5,000, he bars him, as he had another youngster a few weeks before for the same offence. Callum’s Dad the local gangster who pours much of his ill-gotten gain into the pub’s football youth team not to mention the pub itself, asks Paddy to make an exception with his son promising to deal with him at home. Paddy refuses to serve Miller a pint for his son, however, which causes a hush to descend on the noisy crowd around the bar. Miller prides himself on being the hard man of this suburban Manchester community and warns Paddy in front of the whole pub that he will break every bone in his body if he hasn’t changed his mind by tomorrow afternoon. So the landlord is left with a painful dilemma, potentially very painful indeed. Understandably Paddy’s wife wants him to remain in one piece and give in to Miller. On the other hand Paddy’s head-strong son wants to get involved in the fray and threatens to attack Callum if Miller lays a finger on his Dad. Paddy’s priority is to ensure his son goes back to his Uni’ the next day so he tells him he’s going to serve Miller and Callum just to make sure his lad keeps out of things and catches his train. After much wrestling with his conscience and various failed attempts to enlist support from the local community, Paddy is faced with Miller and son in a virtually empty bar at three in the afternoon. Paddy stands his ground provoking a gruesome ‘battering’ from Miller and is taken off to hospital. Despite broken ribs and an extremely fat lip, Paddy refuses to stay in hospital and is behind the bar later that night when Miller swaggers up to the bar with his son to order drinks. Paddy asks Callum whether he felt it was right that he’d been barred from the pub. When the lad meekly agrees that he does, Paddy gets him to admit that the only reason he's here is because his Dad’s made him. Paddy pours Callum a pint but serves it with a pink straw and yellow umbrella like a 'girly' cocktail in full view of the whole pub who gawp in stunned silence at the scene. As Miller glares accusingly at Paddy, Hoskins brilliantly delivers the first of the stories twin punch-lines like one of those gloriously poker-faced actors in the Westerns. He turns to the father and with that unmistakeable, husky drawl and glowering glance says to Miller: You’re bringing him up like a tart, so I’m going to serve him like one. At that moment all the resentment Callum feels towards his Dad surfaces and he storms out of the bar. Miller can find no answer to this damning indictment of his parental failure and slowly retreats from the scene. Paddy clears the pub of all the cowards who had deserted him at his hour of need earlier in the day leaving just a sad drunk who has witnessed both the battering earlier that day, and Paddy’s revenge. “That was the bravest thing I have ever seen” Tommy mumbles. Hopkins then delivers the line that encapsulates the meaning of the whole parable. As he gently escorts Tommy to the door he says, “it took guts, yeah; but you know what took even more guts Tommy? Doing it sober.” This confirmed what had been hitherto implied in the drama; Paddy was a recovering alcoholic who has learned the meaning of courage the hard way. Later, on the news, there were pictures of violent youths throwing petrol bombs during the Orange Order marches in Belfast, and British soldiers terrorizing Iraqi prisoners to extract information from them. Like Miller in the drama these real-life figures seemed no more than shadows of men; Hopkins through his beautifully under-stated performance of a plucky landlord showed us the real thing-just like that other story-teller from Palestine all those years ago .

Never too old, never too young!

2009-06-30T02:57:00.000-07:00

My eighty year old mother was off-loading her growing anxiety about the new one-act play we are due to start rehearsing shortly: “darling you, don’t understand! It’s my short-term memory that’s going. Even when I’m giving talks, I can’t seem to find the right words anymore.” Most people would be filled with compassion at this complaint which conjures up images of poor Iris Murdoch as portrayed by Judi Dench in the film about the writer’s tragic loss of memory in later life struggling to understand straight-forward questions in a television interview. I, however, am my mother’s son and share with her an impatience towards the moans and groans of others. Moreover, although I am approaching fifty I am still relatively fit and healthy and find it hard to appreciate how the brain gradually loses some of its basic functions in advancing years. In fairness, I also know my mother from of old and am used to her initial resistance to stepping out of her comfort zone. “Just you wait to till you’re eighty,” she declaimed. “I would be delighted if my children still wanted to work with me by then,” I reposted. We shall see, we shall see. This new play is about the Victorian poet Christina Rossetti, and is written by my friend Simon Machin. Simon is around the same age as me and has spent most of his life dealing with numbers as an accountant, despite reading English at Oxford. He feels as though he’s buried his literary talent in the earth for too many years, and having completed the play, “Poison in the Blood” Simon declared he had at last found his vocation. “You’re never too old,” I replied, sharing his enthusiasm. His play is partly about the realities of old age as Rossetti faces her final ‘bleak mid-winter’ in her house in Bloomsbury. Knowing death is imminent, the poet is concerned to protect her legacy from prying biographers (yes, I suppose we are guilty here, too!) and thus she is destroying old letters which might be misinterpreted. More importantly, Rossetti is concerned to preserve her soul from the intrusions of predatory priests keen on extracting death-bed confessions from such an eminent public figure. The poet was by all accounts a somewhat haunted figure right up to her death in spite of her robust Christian faith, and this is reflected in much of her brooding, melancholy verse throughout her life. Poems such as ‘Think of me when I am gone,” are often read at funerals. Simon’s play sensitively depicts Rossetti’s ultimate triumph over her dark side without ducking the complex factors which contributed to much of her unhappiness. At the end of the play, having politely declined the reserved sacrament for the sick and dying offered by the intrusive priest Rev. Gutch, Rossetti bites into a juicy ripe peach allowing the syrupy juice to trickle down her neck in a most inappropriate way for a Victorian lady. This fleeting gesture graphically symbolizes the character’s ultimate discovery of the sheer sensual joy of life once she has freed herself from the binding constraints of a censorious society. Such a world as this with its rigid, moral codes and religious fundamentalism suffocates the soul like a whale-boned corset. If the play has a simple message at its heart, it might be: “you are never too old to find salvation, you are never too old.” The reminder that we are never too old for all sorts of things, was beautifully captured in a recent documentary presented by Alan Yentob about ‘The Company of Elders,’ a dance troupe funded by Sadler’s Wells Theatre whose members range from sixty-one to eighty-five. This company travels around the world performing complex modern choreography in internationally renowned arenas, as well as off-beat community venues such as a gay bar. The choreographer working with them on their current piece remarked how these elderly dancers brought a quality onto the stage which younger performers in their prime found elusive. This was perhaps a generosity of soul ripened through good times and bad. This was most apparent when they work-shopped a scene about their memory of the blitz and the reality of evacuation. The stooped figures with those deeply-lined faces lit by haunting, sunken eyes captured an image of childhood vulnerability relived from a distance of many years. The choreographer could hardly speak when he debriefed the exercise; he was extremely moved. One of the many follies particular to our age is to assume that only the young and beautiful can reflect the power and the glory of life. This is often apparent in Hollywood especially for female performers who are discarded as soon as their skin sags. It is also implicit in many other walks of life today such as in politics where each of the current leaders of our main parties are still learning how to raise young families. God reveals his majesty and might (which includes his child-like vulnerability and profound wisdom) through the whole spectrum of humanity and often most poignantly at the extremes. “Out of the mouths of infants you have ordained praise” declared the psalmist. Never was this more powerfully demonstrated to me than by a choir of seven year olds from Southwater Infants School in Sussex. They were performing in the chapel of Christ’s Hospital School along with some older children. I was particularly struck by their rendition of an up-beat version of “The Lord’s My Shepherd.” They sung the refrain ‘And I will trust in him alone’ with such disarming conviction that I am sure the most militant atheist would have melted in their pew. At the end of the concert the choir filed out of the chapel to a spontaneous standing ovation. I spoke with the director of music at Christ’s Hospital about the infants from Southwater and he highlighted the sheer visceral impact of untrained (though not untutored) voices singing for the sheer joy of being alive. You’re never too old, and you’re never too young to serve the living God.

Symphony No. 7

2009-06-22T08:43:00.001-07:00

Symphony No. 7

A year or so ago my wife Rachel was asked to take over as leader of the Horsham Symphony Orchestra. This was set up in 1971 by the then director of music at the nearby Christ’s Hospital (a Bluecoats school )with a couple of local residents. Since then the HSO has contributed richly to the musical life of this West Sussex market town giving three major concert a year at the Capitol Theatre. The fifty or so members of the orchestra are largely amateur but are conducted and strengthened by a handful of excellent local professionals. They also invite well established soloists to perform major works with them as often as possible and are currently conducted by the prolific Steve Dummer. They describe themselves as a “friendly orchestra” who welcome new members of all ages and indeed there are a handful of very fresh faced lads and lasses in the string and brass sections in particular. They rehearse for their termly concert on a Wednesday evening and on the day of the performance they spend several hours aiming for the polish and control live performances invariably demand.
On Saturday evening I took the girls (both aspiring string players) to see their mum lead the orchestra in Dvorak’s seventh symphony as well as accompanying the pianist Benjamin Pope performing Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 21 K467.
The seventh symphony was written with the grand intention of “moving the world,” and it is certainly full of high drama right from the start with its brooding string sequence establishing the tempestuous tone of the score. The symphony came in the second half of the programme and I had the impression that the orchestra was by now fully warmed-up and open to the spirit of Dvorak’s soaring music bringing it wonderfully alive some century and a quarter on from its original performance. The marvellous thing about experiencing live, as opposed to recorded music, is that you can sense so much more the mood of the musicians as the piece unfolds. You can perceive the gradual awakening to the transcendent power of the music drawing them into that almost mystical plane of inspiration required to really connect with the really great classical compositions. It is perhaps especially intriguing to observe mainly amateur performers, whose weekdays are taken up with various civic and municipal roles or looking after their young children, finding an outlet for their artistic nature under the dramatic glare of stage lanterns. Moreover there is something almost trance-like about the way a fifty-piece orchestra grouped around their conductor find the extraordinary collective energy and acute sensitivity demanded by a composer such as Dvorak. Seeing the string section sawing and swaying as one to the mysterious patterns majestically traced in the air by the conductor’s baton is highly dramatic in itself. Moreover the HSO make a deeply resonant sound and even as a classical layman I could sense that they had been brilliantly guided and prepared by their conductor and leader to respond to the complex moods and musical ideas within the piece as well as its overall emotional arc. I was particularly struck by the programme notes about the symphony which I hurriedly read in the interval to prepare myself for the composition. I learnt that Dvorak had shortly turned down a commission for a major opera in Vienna, because the producers insisted the libretto be written in Austrian rather than his native language. At the time there was a wave of resentment in Bohemia towards Austrian imperialism, and Dvorak felt it would be a form of betrayal to comply with the producer’s demands and so he turned down this opportunity in spite of his ambition to be an internationally known opera composer. The programme implied that this, together with his mother’s death, gave the seventh symphony its distinct air of conflict. As I watched the orchestra become increasingly transported by this turbulent mood, I reflected on how this spirit of defiance in the music might resonate with the individual members of the orchestra. We live in an economic system that leaves us precious little time to express our artistic talents. Most of these musicians would struggle to find the time to make their weekly rehearsals let alone the hours needed to really master the score. They must instead follow the tempo and rhythm of market capitalism with its dreary cycles of buying and selling, and profit and loss, in order to keep afloat in the flood-tides of the credit crunch. Such mechanical, repetitive cycles lack the heroic drama of Dvorak’s grand symphony with its surging passionate intensity. They too often reduce our lives to a grim and colourless struggle to hold onto our job so we can simply keep our money lenders at bay. This is a tragically reductive picture of who we are truly called to be, as people made in the image of the divine creator. We are infact all artists called to respond to the music of the rolling spheres, and the melody in our souls in many varied creative ways. However, like Dvorak we too have to take a stand against those forces which would rob of us of our true identity and turn us into a mere function of the state. Here at the civic theatre of Horsham in West Sussex, fifty or so ordinary citizens dressed in black were giving up their souls to the transcendent power of a grand symphony and reminding the several hundred members of the audience of the magnificent drama of being alive.

Heart of Darkness

2009-06-15T09:22:00.000-07:00

The latest challenge of my monthly book group was to read ‘Heart of Darkness’ by Joseph Conrad. The closest I had got to this or any other novel by Conrad, was watching the loose film-adaptation ‘Apocalpse Now’ some thirty years ago. The film shifts the story from nineteenth century Africa to the Vietnam War. I vaguely recall Marlon Brando cowering in a cave intoning that most darkly poignant reflection on the human condition found in both the book and movie: ‘the horror, the horror.’ Both narratives focus on a long journey up the river (in Conrad’s case the Congo) to recover a character named Kurtz who has become deranged by his encounter with the deep, dark, jungle. Conrad causes us to question whether it was the rampant imperialism of the so-called civilized world which he served, rather than a return to the primitive origins of civilization itself, which led Kurtz to such dark despair. The book is as dark as its title, both in its grim perception of humanity, and its lack of illumination of the central character. We are left with many doubts and questions, which is no doubt Conrad’s aim. I suppose it’s the kind of novel that gives a certain type of art and literature a bad name with those who are impatient with modern practitioners. They criticise such work, believing it wallows in its own negativity, or deliberately seeks to confuse its audience by playing games with conventional form. Christians, it has be said, have a somewhat embarrassing track-record of recoiling from such art, quoting St. Paul’s admonition to the Philippian church to think on ‘whatever is pure, whatever is lovely whatever is admirable,’ to justify their reticence. This is often, though not always, to misunderstand both St. Paul and the nature of such art and literature. In ‘Heart of Darkness’ Conrad employs a particular form of quest narrative known from the Ancient Greek period as katabasis. This kind of narrative took the form of a hero’s journey down into the world of the dead, in order to help him gain wisdom and understanding. Writers like Homer and Virgil established a literary form which would influence many of the great writers throughout history right up to the present day. Indeed this mythological structure gives us profound insight into the nature of the Christian story. Christ can be seen as an archetypal mythological hero who descends into the belly of the earth, into hell in fact before ascending to heaven, to bring salvation and ultimately the gift of the Holy Spirit to mankind. Thus the literary pattern reflects the profound spiritual journey at the heart of the divine/human story. Conrad’s story whether intentionally or not takes us into our own heart of darkness, our own hell. This is not some savage jungle far removed from our green and pleasant land, but the basement of our own civilized society. European Imperialism as depicted by Conrad revealed the ruthless savagery concealed by the clipped vowels and starched collars of the capitalist bounty hunters. Marlow, the teller of the story within the story, relates his experience of seeing native slave labourers dying of sheer exhaustion on his way down the Congo: ‘as I stood on this hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly.’
Contrary to popular misconception, Christianity does not sentimentalize the human condition or seek to escape from it any more than Conrad did in his book. The Cross of Christ similarly reveals humanity’s ‘pitiless folly.’ By taking us on this katabasis, this desent into a heart of darkness, both the Bible and Conrad’s novel purge us of all the false illusions we surround ourselves with to avoid radical transformation. At the end of the novel, the narrator leaves us with the image of the tranquil waters of the Thames flowing out and beyond ‘into the heart of an immense darkness.’ These are unsettling and even profoundly disturbing words, but they still have a terrible ring of truth today. When Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, stood up at Pentecost to talk to the crowds he revealed deeply troubling truths about the human condition which left his audience ‘cut to the heart.’ The Church which was built from that great speech by the apostle was erected on a deep recognition of our human capacity for evil, when we turn away from the fount of all goodness. Although we can rejoice at Christ’s descent into darkness to set us free from sin and death, we still have much to learn from art which reminds us just how much we need redemption.

Johnny Depp for Pentecost

2009-06-04T12:41:00.000-07:00

It was a couple of nights before The Day of Pentecost. This day, which was not so very long ago celebrated as Whitsun, passes by almost unnoticed, even in some churches. The liturgical calendar is fading from our collective memory. My family had decided we were due for a film night to mark the end of half-term, (no one mentioned Pentecost;) so while my eldest daughter was having her braces fitted at the orthodontist, I looked in the library for a DVD.
“What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” is an intriguing sounding title and I knew my daughters would be thrilled with anything featuring Johnny Depp; they were not disappointed. Gilbert Grape lives in Endora, Iowa, population 1,901, “Describing it,” says Gilbert, “is like dancing to no music… It’s a town where nothing much ever happens, and nothing ever will.” The film’s opening shot, is of a long, straight, empty road sloping down and then up toward a flat, low, horizon. Gilbert is waiting by the wayside with his mentally retarded younger brother Arnie, for the annual arrival of long distance travellers in their camper vans. That it seems is the highlight of Gilbert and Arnie’s year. It’s not just this dull neighbourhood which is “eating Gilbert,” however, nor even his brother’s condition; it’s his family’s unresolved past. His mother had been the prettiest woman in the neighbourhood until his father was, “hung out to dry” seventeen years ago- (he hanged himself in the basement). Now she is thirty six stone and has become a virtual recluse which inevitably makes the bored local population all the more intrigued. She lies on the family sofa like a beached whale and when she moves, which is rarely, the timber floor creaks and groans under the strain. Eventually Gilbert’s friend helps him to put some supports under the floor-boards, which I suppose is a metaphor for how the family treat their own shaky existence. They live with it rather than confront it or seek to change it. A story such as this needs an “inciting incident” to tilt the even balance of the plot and create drama. This is provided by the arrival of a mysterious, beautiful, girl called Becky, with her Grandmother in one of the caravans passing through Iowa. Some sort of engine trouble impels them to stay longer than intended and Becky, who is like a breath of fresh air in the stifling summer heat, becomes Gilbert’s lover and ultimately his salvation. I won’t spoil it by giving away the details of the plot, but let me just highlight a couple of images from the film which made an impact, and got me to think about The Day of Pentecost. The first is that long road leading in and out of Iowa. Gilbert and Arnie wait there again at the end of the film. It’s one year later but this time they are planning to take off with Becky and her grandmother in their caravan, to explore the highways and byways beyond . When Arnie asks his brother whether he will be able to come along, Gilbert says: “We can go anywhere we want. We can go anywhere.” The image of the long, empty road disappearing towards the horizon had been like a symbol out of a Samuel Beckett play at the start of the movie- a symbol of futility; the road to nowhere! Now that same shot of the vanishing point on the horizon was pregnant with the notion of arrival, departure, moving on, and change.
The day of Pentecost began with waiting, too. The disciples were all together in an upper room when the Spirit blew through it like a tornado, propelling them out to the ends of the earth to preach the Gospel. Moreover, the image of the disciples huddled together in the upper-room on that day reminds the reader of how those same disciples had gathered behind closed doors, paralysed with fear, following the crucifixion of Jesus just days before. In both the film and the Biblical stories we are being shown how the bleakest landscape, or the most apparently confined space can be transformed by the power of love.
The second image in the film was of the family house all in flames. This is done deliberately by Gilbert for a good reason which I shall leave you to discover for yourself. Again the sight of the wild, wind-fuelled fire gutting the old timber house against the darkening sky is profoundly symbolic, and the director makes the most of this sequence. Gilbert and the family are no longer willing to prop up the past with its sadness and shame eating away at their life at home; they have come to a place of cleansing and a new beginning, which can only be effected through fire. This recalls the coming of both the wind and fire at Pentecost described in the book of the Acts of the Apostles. Fire is sometimes profoundly destructive, but in both these cases there is something inspiring about the orange blaze which erases the past with its darkness and decay and ushers in a new dawn with a fresh horizon. This idea is beautifully captured on film as the image of the fire at night dissolves into a close up of Gilbert’s face against the grey scudding clouds of morning. He is purged and transformed over night, and thus the next shot of the open road which ends the film is now full of bright hope. “What’s eating Gilbert Grape is a marvellous film for any time of the year, but I particularly enjoyed it at Pentecost.

Secular Prayers

2009-05-18T07:53:00.000-07:00

Carol Ann Duffy was announced as the new Poet Laureate this month, to replace Andrew Motion after he had completed his ten years in office. Apparently he has suffered writer’s block for four of those, because of the pressure to gush forth on such uninspiring pretexts as a royal wedding. Nonetheless, he does not regret accepting the post and believes it has given him the opportunity to raise the profile of poetry in the public eye. Duffy is a Laureate for our time one suspects. She is the first woman to be appointed since the post began over three hundred years ago, and her openly gay stance may perhaps make a few folk sit up and listen just to see if she has anything shocking to say. I have not read enough of her work to ascertain her religious sensibilities, but I was interested to hear her state that poems were ‘secular prayers’ in a recent interview. Indeed she wrote a deeply contemplative sonnet in 1993 called ‘Prayer,’ which was part of a collection based around the theme of ending a relationship. I came across it some while ago and, like all great verse, it went straight to the heart.

PRAYER

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade I piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child’s name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer –
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

The poem has a music which takes you beyond the logical mind, just as the most potent prayers are able to do. It has the small but perfectly formed frame of a sonnet, and a simple, almost child-like rhyme scheme which gives it a gentle liturgical lilt. Indeed ‘pray for us now’ is a fragment from a well known Catholic prayer to Mary, and even the place names of the shipping forecast in the final line are made to sound like a solemn chant from the divine offices of night. Moreover the poem itself illuminates the litany of sounds which weave in and out of our conscious mind through the course of each day calling us to prayer. There is ‘the distant Latin chanting of a train,’ the ‘Grade I piano scales,’ the calling for a child and ‘the radio’s prayer’ reaching into the lonely rain swept islands. Even the trees may sing to us when we most need their consolation. Whether intentionally or not, Carol Ann Duffy has celebrated the ceaseless prayer which ripples from the centre of everyday life. It ‘utters itself’ as a ‘sudden gift’ and consoles ‘the lodger looking out across a Midland town.’ These ‘prayers’ somehow illuminate the ‘darkness’ for the characters in the poem. This darkness is experienced as sorrow, regret, and loneliness and it is this, which prevents them from praying in the first place. Perhaps she calls this and other poems secular prayers, because they capture the experience of people finding faith or hope or comfort from within the ordinary rather than sacred spheres of existence; or perhaps because Carol Ann Duffy does not share a particular religious persuasion. Either way, this brilliant and worthy poet Laureate has understood more than most, that the essence of prayer is not so much something we choose to do, but it is rather received unexpectedly as a ‘sudden gift.’ May she speak to the heart of our nation in these dark days of recession.

Open Space

2009-05-18T07:51:00.000-07:00

‘There is a vitality, a life-force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost….the world will not have it.’ The brilliant American choreographer Martha Graham spoke these profoundly challenging words to her dance students in the last century, but I found them apt for the first workshop of a new arts programme I began at my local church at the start of May. Open Space offers adults from all faiths and backgrounds a creative workshop in the arts each month as a means of unlocking the deep spiritual treasures which are hidden within the depths of every soul. God, by any definition is essentially creative, and since Christians understand humanity to be made in this image, we are perhaps closest to the divine when we are exercising our innate artistic gifts. The problem, as Graham’s words emphasize, is that we are inclined to ‘block’ our own creativity. The reasons for this are manifold and complex, but they certainly have something to do with a lack of self-belief or a paralysing self-consciousness, which inhibits the sort of free-flowing energy and spontaneity that is at the heart of inspirational art in any field. For this first workshop, I chose to lead the group in some creative writing. I did not tell them this before hand, as this would have given them the opportunity to block their creativity by not showing up at all! We began by looking at the above quote, and at some key lines from Robert Alter’s beautiful translation of Psalm 139. This ‘David psalm’ evokes God’s sensitive sculpting of our unique individual life with the words, ‘From behind and in front You shaped me /and You set your palm upon me…..You created my innermost parts, / wove me in my mother’s womb.’ How deeply affirming are both the psalmist’s and Martha Graham’s words for the would-be artist who wonders whether they have anything unique to offer. We continued the session by slowly tuning into the descending silence of the space around us and within us, identifying the clutter of thoughts and feelings strewn across our interior landscape from the busyness of the day. Each person then listened to and wrote down five sounds they could hear. Having done this they wrote a paragraph about what things they associated with those different sounds. Afterwards each person read back one of their paragraphs to the group. Inevitably the sounds were similar; ticking clocks, bird song, squeaky doors, but of course the various responses were idiosyncratic, revealing the unique histories and personalities of the group. One lady coined a beautiful phrase about the choral evensong of the birds who sang ‘arias in branches,’ whilst a more prosaic and witty soul observed the need for DW40 to ease a squeaky door. However, it’s also significant how we find it hard to share our work without wanting to explain ourselves in some way. It’s a way of protecting ourselves from the savage critics we imagine hovering somewhere in the room waiting to rip us to shreds. Where does that come from? I can’t believe we have all had monstrous parents or teachers who condemned our first artistic efforts out of hand. Yet, somehow we have internalized such negative and destructive voices. I was aware, too. of my own impulse as the facilitator to pass comment on people’s work, so for the next exercise I suggested that we all bit our tongues rather than comment on our or other’s efforts just for the sake of filling the silence.

For this, I gave each member of the group five random topics; garden furniture, Marilyn Monroe, eagles, the earth’s core and fireworks. I instructed them to write freely and spontaneously for about five minutes (roughly one side of A4) on each subject. Of course this seemed more like an exam, and all the anxieties about being able to find anything to say crowded in, causing nervous giggles to ripple around the table. Eventually that concentrated stillness was felt by all. As I was the facilitator, I had the chance to observe the beauty of people writing as their ideas spilled out onto the paper with that disarming eagerness to do their very best.

So we again heard one topic from each of the dozen participants, but this time without the throat-clearing pre-ambles. One man, a builder, read out his response to garden furniture, which was a cleverly shaped narrative written from the perspective of a garden bench circling an old tree. It reflected on the various characters in the neighbourhood who had sat and gossiped there. After we had all finished reading our passages, John confessed he had felt a bit out of his depth when he had begun the session. We counteracted this by heaping praise on such a fine piece of writing. His inspiration had come from just such a garden seat he’d admired while working on someone’s home, and this had sparked his imagination in the writing workshop this evening.

At the end of the workshop, we considered the notion of a writer ‘finding their voice,’ as an apt metaphor for our journey of faith. When we first begin to explore our spirituality, or follow a religion, we are inclined to fall into clichés just like a novice writer. We have an idea of what a Christian, for example, is supposed to be, and thus try to adopt the appropriate behaviour. This is perhaps an understandable starting point, but becomes disastrous if we get stuck in this groove. There comes a time when we have to discover our unique voice and signature as a saint. This may take a life-time to evolve, but the sooner we move away from the rigid stereo-types of the religious life, the sooner we will find that ‘unique expression,’ which Martha Graham sought from her dancers. Jesus, Moses, Buddha, Mohammed, and Shakespeare were all one offs! So should we be, regardless of our religious persuasion or artistic talent..

The Land

2009-05-05T06:43:00.000-07:00

The start of May has brought brilliant sunshine and the usual accompanying fervour to most of England this year. Under-graduates at Oxford risked life and limb on May 1st by jumping off Magdalen Bridge into just a few feet of water, despite the presence of the police. Here in Sussex I reluctantly ventured outdoors to confront the jungle that was once our garden. Thickets of grass had grown up through the cracks in the patio paving, the lavateria had climbed half way across the weed ridden, unkempt lawn, and the out of control conifers were invading the table and parasol at the far end, deterring us from the joy of dining alfresco. Even the delicate cherry blossom and scarlet Rhododendron bush that had briefly blossomed at the end of April, had begun to shed their petals in protest at my appalling neglect of nature. However, it’s gratifying how much progress can be made with the weather on your side, and since ours is only a small plot of land, I had managed to restore at least some apparent order to the garden in just a few days.

Thus, with a glow of achievement to match my weathered face, I drove my friend Simon down to the delightful Hamlet of Bignor on the edge of the South Downs, to see a dramatization of Vita Sackville-West’s epic poem, ‘The Land.’ I had never been to Bignor before, but an early sunlit evening in May was the perfect time to make its acquaintance. In the centre of the village is Holy Cross Church where the performance was taking place. An enterprising warden has developed a marvellous year-round programme of arts events at this glorious thirteenth century Church, and it was evident as we searched for a parking space in the narrow lane leading up to Holy Cross that he has made a great success of this venture. There were clusters of candles and lanterns, and an inviting bar near the church entrance where an interesting mix of the well-heeled, together with more rustic or certainly elderly folk had assembled for the performance.
‘The Land’ was the poem which Vita Sackville-West hoped the literati to remember her by. She toiled away at it between 1923-1926, with the patience and tenacity of the farmers she described in its pages,. This epic verse, around 2,500 lines long, dramatizes the encounter between man and the soil, most particularly her beloved Weald of Kent, through the seasons of the year. It is one the one hand broodingly unsentimental, acknowledging the intense conflict between the two, yet it is also charged with her infectious wonder at the beauty which emerges from the struggle:

“ The country habit has me by the heart.
He is bewitched forever who has seen
Not with his eyes but with his vision, spring,
Flow down the woods and stipple leaves with sun”

‘The Land’ has been very cleverly adapted and performed by Tim Laycock, an excellent actor and folk musician with a fine tenor voice, and Sonia Ritter an actress who has played weighty Shakespearean roles at theatres like the Globe in London. She recited long sections of the poem with magnificent intensity, as if to suggest the sheer thrill of the poet when originally penning her lines of verse all those years ago. Tim Laycock skilfully brought to life a wide range of farmers and rural craftsmen celebrated in the poem, such as the Thatcher. In this adaptation, the rich sensuality of the poetry was punctuated by rustic folk songs, with which many of the elderly in the audience joined in, making the performance feel like a communal ritual of remembrance for a way of life that, alas, has gone for ever. In the interval Simon and I sipped our wine looking over toward the Downs in the fading light. Our enterprising warden was lighting the gas flares which lined the path from the church gate to the porch. I remarked to Simon that it felt as if I’d hardly be born at all, after hearing the extraordinary litany of flowers celebrated in ‘The Land.’ Having been a Londoner for the first thirty years of life, it struck me how we need to be initiated into a deep bond with the land and nature, preferably in our early years. Parents, teachers on extended field trips, and perhaps in this case the nature poet herself, may begin this rite of passage, but we must ultimately ‘grasp the nettle’ ourselves. I’m not sure that I have, as yet. Even now, I am uneasy passing a horse on a country walk, and the trees and flowers of the fields seem like distant relations at best.
In spite of the dour reluctance of the soil to yield to cultivation, there is a sense in ‘The Land’ of a deep, mysterious collaboration between man and nature to unearth the Divine treasure that sustains and enriches life. I was interested to read that Vita Sackville-West had ‘no formal religion,’. I’m not sure the Church would know quite what to make of her affairs with other women, even now. Nonetheless, her poem seems profoundly spiritual, and she certainly uses Christian imagery in places. Her celebration of the turning year has a liturgical feel about it, and the poem has clearly grown from a deep meditation on what is, after all, one of the seven sacraments of the Church. I sense that we must seek to understand nature more and more as we get older, if we are to unlock the mysteries of the Spirit. As Jesus says to Nicodemus when he fails to comprehend the notion of spiritual rebirth in the Gospel of John, ‘I have spoken to you of earthly things, and still you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things?’ Moreover, reading the parables of Christ in the Gospels, reveals how deeply Jesus reflected on the cycles of nature and the work of the farmer, in order to make sense of the mystery of being. His is a spirituality, like Vita’s, rooted in the land. In one of his stories Jesus speaks of a farmer’s seed choked by thistles, and snatched away by the birds. When he later expounded the parable, it was clear that the soil represented the soul of mankind, and the seed the Word of God. Jesus, a son of the land, understood like the poet, the struggle to cultivate beauty from stubborn nature.
So back to my garden, to turn the heavy soil, which stares darkly up at me from the flower-beds, and to re-seed the patchy lawn, with its spreading moss and stubborn weeds. It’s never too late to begin, as they say. It’s never too late.

War Horse

2009-04-27T08:12:00.000-07:00

The adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s novel ‘War Horse’ by The National Theatre has to be one of the greatest theatrical achievements of the new millennium. The plot in its original form focuses on the carnage of the First World War from the perspective of Joey, a Devonshire thoroughbred who is sold by his cruel owner to the local yeomanry at the outbreak of the conflict. In the novel, Joey relates the highs and lows of his experience of the ‘Great War’ including his first cavalry charge, his capture by the Germans, and the different relationships he formed along the way with his various riders and the other horses who suffered the folly and brutality of that darkest episode in British history.
In this dramatization, the horses are portrayed by life-size puppets created for the production by the South African Company Handspring. These beautiful creations are made from bamboo, leather and gauze and each are manipulated by three actors who have been brilliantly trained by Handspring over the course of rehearsals to bring them to life. One actor operates the neck and head from outside with a rod, the other two manoeuvre the back and front legs from within its vast body. Although these magnificent ‘horses’ do not speak, we somehow see the action of the drama from their perspective and they are undoubtedly the stars of the show, especially Joey.
War Horse is a love story between the eponymous hero and Albert, the son of the cruel farmer who sells his beloved horse to the Yeomanry at the outset of the conflict. Albert finds in Joey in those brief years before the war everything missing in his father; affection, nobility, transcendence and he devotes himself to caring for the horse, protecting him from his hateful owner. Joey responds with all the admirable loyalty animals can offer humanity.
The wider story of the First World War that is told in ‘War Horse’ is in one sense very familiar; the horror of the guns, the desperate, doomed charges against the enemy, the gas, the shell shock of the soldiers. However, the unusual perspective we are given brings home both its tragedy and folly as if we are hearing about war for the first time. There is something very poignant about the mute chorus of puppets we encounter throughout the play. They are the silent witnesses of one of the most unforgivable crimes of that bloody century, and also the most innocent of its many victims.
Through the strange upside-down logic of theatre, the fact that they are puppets and that we can see the actors manipulating them makes them all the more real as we increasingly suspend our disbelief during the progress of the play. This is partly a tribute to the art of the puppeteers. The bamboo is cleverly crafted to define the geometric shapes that comprise the animal; the leather gives the colour and texture of the horse especially under stage lights. The skill and indeed humility of the puppeteers render themselves almost invisible after a while which makes the horses appear to have a life of their own. I became riveted by the mysterious impulses of these creatures throughout the course of the play. It was as though their puppeteers were acting as channels of some mysterious force that moved the horses at unexpected moments to respond to events happening on stage. The ‘horses’ manifested that strange intuitive wisdom that we associate with what’s best in animals and it was as though they alone could sense the impending doom as the British armies marched jauntily off to war in their bright buttoned uniforms, to the absurd sound of the brass bands.
There is something almost mechanical about the appearance of these creatures, with wheel-like hip joints tapering into stilt-like legs which break at intricately designed sockets. This underlines both the sheer beauty of the animal’s design and also the way a reckless humanity reduces such beauty to a mere function in its absurd projects like the ‘Great War.’ The insanity which swept Europe into this futile conflict, is frequently underlined in the production by the fact the many of the soldiers have no idea how to look after their horses. They use hunting horses like Joey and Topthorn as farm horses to cart weaponry across the boggy fields of France, and one of the most pitiful sights in the play, is the latter’s inevitable collapse from sheer exhaustion. When man loses touch with nature, all hell breaks loose. We are still learning this, alas.
Despite the grim realism of the plot, there was in this adaptation a haunting mysticism which brought a sense of transcendence to the drama. This was achieved largely through some glorious folk songs from the composer John Tams. These were performed by a lone figure with his accordion standing chorus-like, on the edge of the stage between the battles. He sang of the cycles of nature, the hardiness of the land and its enduring capacity for renewal, and through this and the heroism of characters like Joey and Albert, we are left with hope. People often ask where God might be, when we witness the worst that humanity can do. One answer that is often suggested is to say that he is to be found in the innocent victim. In this re-telling of the horror of war, the Divine was made manifest in Joey, the noble and courageous war horse brought vividly to life by his sensitive puppeteers. If you don’t get to see the play, read the book.

Marley and Me

2009-04-27T08:10:00.000-07:00

We were visiting the girls Grandma in the Easter holidays and our elder daughter was keen to see the new film ‘Marley and Me’ based on the book by John Grogan. Part of a Dad’s duty, and sometimes delight, is to go with his children to see movies he wouldn’t go to of his own accord. This is fair enough, particularly as I had dragged Charlotte off to look round a Georgian stately home in The Fens on our way to my mother’s. Charlotte had actually found exploring the beautiful house and its two acre walled garden a surprisingly positive experience. Perhaps I would be similarly inspired by this rather slushy sounding film starring Jennifer Aniston.
It’s about newly-weds, John and Jennifer Grogan, who are, like many winning combinations, total opposites, although they share the same occupation as journalists. She is feisty and efficient, and propels them forward along their new journey together, by working through a tick-list of priorities to ensure their life is as happy as can be. Within days of the completed honeymoon, they have headed south to find work in sunny Florida. Once this is accomplished, she drives them off to find a house by the sea. John on the other hand, is charmingly laid-back, with floppy blond hair and a beguiling James Stewart drawl. He admits to his new employer at the local paper, that he is constantly surprised by his own achievements, and in particular finding such a beautiful girl to marry him. In spite of this engaging humility, John does have some ambition, and wants to become a successful reporter one day on a reputable journal like the New York Times. Therefore, he is a little wary of getting saddled with kids before he’s begun to make his mark. His sharper, sassier colleague and friend in Florida, Sebastian, advises him to get a dog to deflect the issue of starting a family from his wife, and so within a short time Marley, an adorable Labrador puppy has been adopted by John and Jenny Grogan. This is the point where our newly weds discover what marriage is all about. Marley may be adorable, but he is also virtually untameable, and far more demanding than they had bargained for. He eats like a horse rather than a puppy, chews through their fixtures and fittings, and has no respect for public decorum. Marley’s problem, which soon becomes theirs, is that he is so full of joie de vivre, that he crashes through every barrier, whether physical or social, in his eagerness to experience life to the full. Inevitably the film exploits the comedy of Marley’s behaviour, but as the story of the Grogan’s marriage develops, we see there is much more to this over-grown puppy than a simple figure of fun. As time goes by, John finds himself somewhat side-lined on the paper. He is asked to write a weekly column about local trivia, while his friend Sebastian is sent off to report on important events unfolding in the wider world. Initially John is understandably ‘blocked’ in his attempt to say anything interesting about the local gossip, but Marley’s eccentric companionship as they rove the neighbourhood, ensures he always finds an interesting anecdote to thread into his new column. Somehow, Marley roots John’s life, and thus his writing, in the messy practical details of everyday existence, and though he still yearns for the big-time, his weekly journal becomes a great success with his local readers. However, when John and Jennifer have children, in fact three in fairly quick succession, the Grogan’s marriage is placed under great strain, particularly since Marley demands the equivalent care of at least the same number again. Jennifer becomes so overwhelmed at one point, that she tears into her gentle giant of a husband. They talk about separation and Jennifer demands at the very least, that John gets rid of Marley once and for all. This crisis forces them to take stock of their life together, and through this they discover what matters most. Both the marriage and Marley, they ultimately decide, are here to stay.
Although, as the film’s title suggests, Marley is very much in the foreground of the film’s action and narrative, he also provides a back-drop for it’s examination of a typical modern marriage. John and Jennifer Grogan struggle with all the common tensions of most middle-class couples in the West today, as they seek to build a family and a future together; the choice between motherhood and career, finding a healthy work-life balance, letting go of unfulfilled ambitions at mid-life, growing to understand and positively accept themselves as they truly are, becoming wise and loving parents. Marley symbolizes the messy chaos of creating a family, the endless needs that have to be met in the process of caring for dependants. This reality is cleverly contrasted with Sebastian’s slicker, yet somewhat selfish, existence as a single-man, dating women wherever he is sent as a successful reporter for The New York Times. To its credit the film does not judge Sebastian, who is portrayed with warmth and humour, but it perhaps hints at what he may be missing. In spite of his boundless energy, Marley inevitably begins to slow down and crawl toward death as the years roll by. This is the messiest and most chaotic factor in caring for anyone, striking painfully at the deep emotional bond that has been formed over the years. Though the film is unashamedly sentimental in showing the Grogan’s pain at facing up to Marley’s death, it is never cheaply so. John, Jennifer and the children are quite understandably devastated at having to say goodbye to their vivacious, affectionate companion through the highs and lows of family life. In a wistful monologue at the end of the film, John reflects how Marley’s love for them had been utterly spontaneous and unconditional. It mattered not a jot to Marley whether they were rich or poor, successful or otherwise . As John muses before the credits roll, how many others love us in quite that way?
In this, the first week of Easter, I found the film uplifting and life-affirming, despite the pathos of its ending. In the Christian story, we are taught that God began the messy, chaotic process of creating a family when he made human-kind in His own image. We learn, especially in the narrative of the crucifixion, just how much that cost him. Yet we are reminded supremely in the Resurrection, that the cost was worth it. In the Crucifixion and Resurrection, God in His love for his wild, unruly family, shares the highs and lows of human history. These momentous paschal events reveal, through the story of Jesus, not only our frightening tendency for self-destruction, but also our ultimate capacity for overcoming the worst that life can throw at us. Every family that perseveres, discovers this wonderful truth. Rachel and I will drive back to Sussex with our girls this Easter, with a renewed vision for our own marriage and family, even if I still can’t persuade her after all these years to let us get a dog.

Seven Last Words

2009-04-27T08:03:00.000-07:00

There’s a handful of village churches clustered close together in the Surrey hills known as ‘The Leith Hill Group.’ On Good Friday, the two pieces of the Cross are brought over Leith Hill to St. James Church in Abinger by members of the other congregations, and banged together at the start of a midday service of meditation. Apart from the obvious symbolism of this ritual, it makes for a wonderful ramble across Vaughn Williams countryside on this most poignant day of the Christian calendar. For the evening, our friend Francis Cave had again organized a concert of music and readings at the little church perched above the village green in Holmbury St. Mary. Francis sings in the village choral society, and they had decided to present some of the more relevant pieces from Handel’s Messiah, in the first part of the programme. My wife Rachel, a violinist, played Abodah, a sombre Jewish lament by Ernest Bloch, for the second half of the programme, and I followed this by reading ‘Seven Sonnets for a Friday Afternoon.’ I had written these poems, based on Christ’s last words from the Cross, especially for this occasion. This had given me a tough creative challenge during lent, especially as I have barely written any verse at all up till now. However, one advantage of choosing this theme as my subject matter, is that the first line is already there for each poem, should one choose to use it as a starting point. Moreover, there is inherent drama and lyricism in the words of a dying man, especially those of the incarnate God. Yet therein also lies a stumbling block for the artist. The subject is rather too familiar, the path so well worn over the past couple of millennia. How can it be approached afresh? No doubt every clergyman asks this same question, when preparing sermons during Holy Week. I wrote the first six poems back in February, and felt vaguely positive about them until I wrote the seventh, which I realized was markedly better than my previous efforts.

It is finished.
The actor bows his head in silence.
The drama is done.
Folds of darkness shroud The Icon
Etched forever on those beating breasts
Recoiling from the tragic scene-
Deaf to the applause of Heaven.
At the Temple in the City
The curtain opens on another stage.
Now everyone’s an actor
With a role to play
In the Holy Company of Fools.
It is finished.
Let the Comedy begin!

The more I compared this to the others, the more dissatisfied I felt with the first six. Apart from a rather clumsy formlessness, they lacked any kind of integrity as a series. An obvious point about the last words of Christ, is that they are variations on a theme from the lips of one man, uttered at the climactic hours of his life. Back to the drawing board! So I began again, with this more successful one as my starting point, and worked backwards, totally rewriting the others.
The key which helped me unlock something of the mystery of Christ’s passion when writing this seventh poem, was using imagery from a world I understood, namely that of theatre and drama. I felt comfortable using this familiar language and playing with its metaphorical possibilities. Even though this is by no means an original approach to the Crucifixion, I feel it gave the poem an authentic, resonant tone, especially for a novice! The other discovery I made when I analysed the verse, was that I had unconsciously used the sonnet form. I decided to do keep to this form for the first six poems too, and again draw upon imagery from the arts, such as painting, sculpture, or music to suggest Christ’s profound awareness of the creative essence of his sacrifice. Restricting yourself to just fourteen lines, forces you to choose and use words sparingly, making sure each one earns its place in the great parade of sound and sense! Brevity is indeed the soul of wit, and perhaps of theology, too. Christ himself, was the master of economy, when for example, he reduced his great wisdom on prayer down to the ‘Our Father,’ or the secret of happiness to those pithy lines known as ‘The Beatitudes.’ ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.’ Indeed his seven last sayings are likewise remarkable for their extraordinary compression, notably that final sentence of just three words. ‘It is finished.’ The Gospel of John beautifully reflects Christ’s instinctive poetic vision when recording the many metaphors he used to reveal his unique nature as both man and God. ‘I am the light of the world’ etc. Yet above all, it is his fleeting life and ministry that speaks with the elegance and eloquence of a sonnet. Here is the son of man breaking bread with the outcasts of Palestine, walking the way to dusty death in Jerusalem, and then appearing on the sparkling shores of Galilee, where it all began. His life, death and resurrection as recorded by his followers trace the mystical cycle of spiritual growth and renewal. So with this in mind, I’ll say no more about the mystery of the Cross, other than to present the rest of the poems which I developed after I had completed the seventh. I was thrilled to discover they were well received by the congregation, along with Rachel’s Abodah, and the Choir’s Messiah. Happy Easter!

Sonnets for a Friday Afternoon

1. Father Forgive Them

Father forgive them; they know not what they do
When they deface the Son of Man and mar
The radiant Holy image printed there
The countenance divine, the morning star.

Your kingly brow is pierced by crown of thorns
To smear your royal cheek with stain of red,
Convert a gracious smile to gruesome leer,
A face of beauty, to a mask of dread.

They hail their work of art with mocking sign
And hang it on a hill for all to see.
Yet what they make, is but an image of themselves
Sundered from the Heart which set them free

And who they mar’s their Father and His Son
The Holy Spirit, God, the Three in One.

2. Paradise

This day you’ll be with me in paradise
Living monument to my Father’s grace
In a mansion set in fragrant gardens,
Eternal realm transcending time and place

Though now, your naked form, wasted and worn,
Wrenched wide in exposition of offence
Before the wrathful glare of baking sun,
Draws howls of horror from your audience

Yet, soon, this very day, your sacred soul
Shall be regarded in a softer light
At rest beneath an arc of weeping willow
With deep compassion and with tender sight.

For all my father fashions from this clay
I offer up in love, this Paschal day.

3. Mother Behold You Son

You were chosen as a virgin
To bear the pain of suffering
Wear the robes of mourning
Share with God, the role of grieving
For His children of the earth.

Yet in truth, my darling woman
Your part has just begun.
For He’s made you Queen of Heaven,
Enthroned till Kingdom Come,
Madonna to the host of nations,
Mother to His Sons.

The Lord has lifted up the humble
And sent away the proud.
He will clothe you with a light celestial,
He will cast away the shroud.

4. I Am Thirsty

From far and wide they came
Drawing water from The Spring;
Hungry minds and thirsty souls
For a taste of things to come.

So I turned their water into wine
Their stale and stagnant souls
Into a Holy temple washed with Love
Flowing streams within.

Now at last I’m thirsty too,
An empty well run dry.
My sap has withered in the heat
And died upon The Tree.

Yet spite of this, My God, I offer up to you,
This shattered pot of clay, to fashion it anew.

5. Why Have You Forsaken Me?

My God, my God why have you forsaken me
Your living Word, begotten Son?
Have you nothing left to say?
Are there no more words to scribe
Upon the tablet of my heart?
In You I’ve lived, and moved and breathed
According to Your inspiration
Through the passage of my days.
You spoke me into life through Your Divine command
And shaped my soul through every shifting scene
To this climactic hour.
Now I’m fixed in time, suspended in the dark,
Waiting for the sign that speaks my end-
That I may live it to the last.

6. Into Your hands

Into Your hands I commit my spirit.
O God in whom I trust.
Dying breath of sad lament
For this scarred and blood-soaked earth.
I have sighed and swayed with sacred songs
For those with ears to hear.
Songs to guide the wandering pilgrim
Lost along her way.
Songs to ease the troubled sinner
Shackled in his soul.
Now, this cadence is for You, my God
This cadence is for You.
May this ebbing sigh of grief inspire
A rousing ode to joy.

Goglin Market - a tale of two sisters.

2009-04-07T03:17:00.000-07:00

As the congregation of St. John’s drifted out of the church clutching their Palm crosses, I began to set up for the final production of ‘Visions in the Wilderness.’ The Space Drama Company which on this occasion consisted of five middle-aged actors were due to present an adaptation of Christina Rossetti’s highly acclaimed poem, ‘Goblin Market’ written one hundred and fifty years ago. As we are planning to tour this show to diverse community venues in the coming weeks, we have kept the staging as minimalist as possible. The poem tells the story of two Victorian sisters who live on the edge of the woods, and relates their dramatic encounters with goblin merchants who entice them with forbidden fruits at night. Laura succumbs to temptation and suffers a terrible sickness of body and soul, until she is restored by her heroic sibling Lizzie. To do so, Lizzie has to visit the dreaded goblins in the woods and withstand their sinister assaults, as they seek to defile her in the same way as her sister. I borrowed five cleverly crafted tree stumps from the props department at my school, piled bark-chippings around each one, to give them a more rooted appearance - and hey presto, we were in the woods! The stumps were arranged within a large circle of seats, providing somewhere for each actor to perch, whilst narrating the poem to the surrounding audience. As well as reciting the poem, we physically embodied the characters and dramatic encounters as often as we could, to really bring the verse off the page. Two members of the church had created an over-hanging orchard of exotic fruits which was lowered on a winch from the ceiling during the opening chant of the goblins: ‘Come buy, come buy!’ Sadly we won’t be taking this design feature with us ‘on the road’, but for now, this gave a powerful focal point for the symbolic heart of the poem. What are Rossetti’s forbidden fruits supposed to represent? Literary scholars have discussed this question, just as Biblical commentators have reflected on those hanging in the garden of Eden. Biographical facts provide some clues. Rossetti wrote Goblin Market around the time she began caring for fallen women in Highgate Penitentiary. Many of these were still teenagers, and had been lured into prostitution by pimps who strolled the streets of London by night. The girls were enticed by the prospect of escaping a life of poverty, since they could make more money in an evening, than many hours of grinding toil in the workhouse. However, apart from the hazard of disease, prostitution often led to a complete spiritual collapse for these poor souls, since they were ostracised from family and society in general. Many a girl ended up face down in the River Thames, unless they found a ‘sister’ like Lizzie to rescue them before it was too late. Rossetti, inspired by her robust Christian faith, became such a sister at the Highgate Penitentiary in the mid 1850’s, and her experience of serving there must surely have fired her imagination while writing the poem. However, it has been suggested that the poem reflects Rossetti’s spiritual journey in more complex ways. She was a sickly lass, herself, from her adolescence onwards. Her illness seems to have been both physical and psychological. If she lived in our time, we should say she was prone to bouts of acute depression. We may also conclude, as her brothers William and Dante Gabriel did even then, that her intense religious faith was as much the cause as the cure of her frequent maladies. Her older sister Maria was perhaps more the model for the heroic Lizzie in the poem than the authoress. Maria eventually became a nun, and throughout her life embodied the solid Victorian virtues expected of healthy females of the time. Christina was the poet, the artist struggling to give expression to an intense inner life, at a time when women were beginning to emerge from centuries of social and psychological oppression. Thus on one level, the poem can be read as a didactic tract for fallen women, pointing along the path of salvation from the degradation of vice. Yet at the same time it captures the tension between two sides of the poet herself, and perhaps many of her more intelligent, sensitive contemporaries. There is Lizzie the more conventional sister who listens to the advice of her elders and thus manages to survive in the brutal patriarchal society governed by Goblin merchants. The fat cats of the Victorian age? And there is Laura, who yearns to break out of the tightly proscribed lifestyle for virtuous young maids of her age, and discovers how vulnerable that makes her, in the ruthless, competitive society of the Darwinian age. Although Rossetti was a Christian and in many ways a high achieving woman for her time, she does not appear to be a happy or whole individual judging by recent biography. Her writing often seems to be a form of therapy, disguised behind the formal patterns of the verse. Many a commentator has remarked on the rich, even erotic sensuality of her description of fruit in the poem. On the one hand she preaches against forbidden desires, on the other she seems to almost celebrate them, in a splendid display of linguistic virtuosity. Whilst Lizzie is being force-fed the fruits by her goblin tormentors, Rossetti writes: ‘ Lizzie uttered not a word; / would not open lip from lip / Lest they should cram a mouthful in: / But laughed in her heart to feel the drip / Of juice that syruped all her face / And lodged in dimples of her chin, / And streaked her neck with quaked like curd.’ There is a fine line between a positive self-denial and a negative repression and it so easily becomes blurred in our quest for fulfilment. There is much talk today from both religious teachers and pyschologists, about the importance of acknowledging our shadow side. That ofcourse is not the same as indulging it, but rather learning to understand and harness the deep conflicts within us in a constructive and creative way. I suspect that Rossetti's personal struggles resulted from her fear, or even disgust of her shadow side. Without the wisdom of Jung, Victorian moralists saw only the black and white of good and evil. This leads to self rejection, and thus often to depression. Yet in her writing, in her art, Rossetti expresses this shadow side in a way that is ultimately healing. In the character of Laura for example, she finds a sensuous and playful way of exploring this side of herself. Then through Lizzie, she expresses compassion and forgiveness to her darker side which brings empowerment to both the sisters by the end of the poem. So with this tale of two sisters, Rossetti brings us to the heart of her complex inner world. It's sad, though perhaps not surprising, considering the era she lived in, that Rossetti herself was not liberated or empowered by such spiritual insights in poems like 'Goblin Market.' Yet perhaps we may benefit from them, in our more enlightened age. A mature spirituality teaches us to live with, and positively embrace ambiguity, paradox and contradiction rather than reduce our world to a black and white of simplistic moral absolutes. The Space Drama Company will take this dramatized poem to the YMCA in Horsham, a retreat centre for the blind and partially sighted in Burgess Hill, a psychiatric ward in Crawley, perhaps a prison or two in Sussex. I hope and pray that this tale of two sisters, the goblins and their fruits, will be an entertaining and stimulating starting point for much discussion and reflection for us all! Watch this space!

Under a Spotlight

2009-03-31T03:03:00.001-07:00

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

2009-03-22T14:57:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-03-15T12:58:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-09T09:17:00.000-07:00

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.

Revolutionary Road

2009-02-16T01:56:00.000-08:00

When we picked up our tickets for Sam Mendes’ new film ‘Revolutionary Road,’ on Valentine’s night, we were told that the heating was not working in Cinema 15. That should have told us we’d made the wrong choice for a romantic movie! Five minutes into the film, our suspicions were confirmed, as Kate Winslet and Leonardo Di Caprio a young married couple from the 1950’s, stood yelling at each other on the edge of a highway somewhere in the suburbs of New York. They were on their way back from an amateur play in which the wife April Wheeler had performed, and it had not been a success. The failure of her play, and the couple’s struggle to talk about it on their way home in the car, summed up the frustration of their suburban life together. It had all seemed so promising when they’d moved into their elegant villa on Revolutionary Road as newly weds, but now several years on, in spite of the arrival of two lovely children, the suffocating existence of clerical work in the City for Frank, and tedious coffee mornings at home for April, had reduced their American Dream to ashes. The message of the film is nothing new, but the excellent script, fine performances, and sensitive direction brings it home afresh with tremendous visceral force. Early on in the script, April sees a raft of hope in this ocean of despair, and grasps at it with all the desperate intensity of a drowning woman. (It was like ‘Titanic’ all over again for these two actors!!) She remembers how Frank had fallen in love with Paris as a young GI in the war, and she wants to escape there now and find a secretarial job. This would allow her husband to take time out from working, and discover what he really wants to do with his life far away from this suffocating society. In those days, especially in their neck of the woods, such a drastic upheaval was virtually unheard of, and the film exploits the comic potential of the neighbour's response as they break the news. After his initial shock, Frank is galvanized by his wife’s plan and it seems that love will triumph over deadening social convention. However, when Frank discovers that April is pregnant, he begins to have doubts, especially when his wife mentions the ‘A’ word. The film strongly implies that this is just the excuse Frank has needed to run away from the challenge of becoming his own man, rather than the social clone he is turning into. This is in fact the dramatic conflict at the heart of the movie. At one point Frank defends his inclination to stay put, by yelling; ‘I have the back-bone not to run away from my responsibilities,’ to which April reposts, ‘it takes back-bone to lead the life you want.’ Kate Winslet brilliantly conveys the struggle for survival of a vital and intelligent woman in a pre-feminist age. She is like one of Ibsen’s tragic heroines, utterly isolated in a world of mindless conformity. Di Caprio likewise captures the pathetic impotence of a man emasculated by consumerism and convention. Around the middle of the film, a wise fool arrives on the scene in the shape of John, the adult son of the Wheeler’s middle-aged neighbours. He is currently in the care of the local psychiatric unit having apparently ‘burnt-out.’ John is a fascinating character and is given some of the best lines in the script, such as the ones he hurls at Frank when he discovers he’s got cold feet about going to Paris because of April’s pregnancy: ‘the only way he can prove he’s got balls is by making babies’ and accuses him of keeping himself comfortable by ‘hiding behind a maternity dress.’

I won’t spoil the film by elaborating further on the plot, but on the way home Rachel and I discussed how hard the film must be to watch, for those who feel they’ve allowed their dreams to be stifled by pursuing other people’s expectations, rather than their own God-given desires. Rachel remarked how the film was aiming to ‘disturb the comfortable,', just as a good sermon should. The ‘feel-good factor’ crudelyinserted in so many films through crass formulaic happy-endings, may do little more than to numb our aching need to come alive, at last. One of April’s neighbours consoles her, when it seems Paris is little more than a fading dream: ‘You just wanted out, I guess,’ he reasons. ‘No, I just wanted in,’ she replies. Sometimes it is a gift to be disturbed, if it stirs and awakens our slumbering spirit. A good film, along with the drama and literature, may do this more effectively than the finest sermon, because it enables us to experience so tangibly the consequences of our actions- albeit vicariously. When we got back to Horsham, we took our places, along with many other couples, at our table for two in a corner of Tortellini’s restaurant. Our romantic evening could begin at last as we scanned the red Valentine’s Day menu! Like the Wheeler’s, like most of the other love-birds around us, we want to be a ‘special couple’ not just another suburban two-some dwindling into middle-aged mediocrity- sapped of vitality and vigour! Others will constantly seek to undermine our attempts to separate ourselves from the pack. As the film suggested, there seems to be a conspiracy among the rest of society to persuade us to settle for empty conformity. However, one line in the film above all the rest should haunt us, should we give in to such delusion: ‘People never forget the truth, they just get better at lying.’ To end this blog with a more positive thought, let me quote from a poem which should inspire us to face the challenge of living the abundant life Christ won for all humanity at Calvary. ‘What will you do with your one, wild, precious life?’

http://www.thespaceproject.org/

The Vitues of Artistic License

2009-02-07T01:14:00.000-08:00

As the snow covered most of the country in white this week, I took to my bed with a nasty cold. I was well enough to sit up in bed and read, but attempting to use my voice (which sounded like a Carlsberg advert or Hollywood trailer) in the school classroom was not a good idea. So I read the three contemporary plays from which we are going to present a selection of scenes, in a presentation called ‘Under a Spotlight.’ This is one of the series of arts events (“Visions in the Wilderness”) taking place during the season of Lent at my local church. I also took the opportunity to watch the DVD of Norman Stones “Tales from the Madhouse.” This will be screened on the first Saturday evening of Lent and will be followed by a discussion. It is set in a crumbling mental asylum -a surreal location evoking a nightmarish state of mind rather than a literal place. The film includes a sequence of dramatic monologues from some of the minor characters mentioned in the Gospels of the New Testament. Each of them tells the story of their brief encounter with Jesus of Nazareth, as they scuttle along dark, dank corridors in some God-forsaken wing of the asylum. Their sinister surroundings create an appropriate backdrop for the tragic tale of their rejection of the one man who might have set them free. Clearly the writers of the monologues have used poetic license to imagine what happened to them after meeting Christ. One of the three plays I read (“The Last Days of Judas Iscariot” by Stephen Adly Guirgis) also uses dramatic licence to tell the story of history’s most infamous betrayal. The play is set in Purgatory, which is imagined as a contemporary New York ghetto! Judas’s story is explored through a court-room drama in which characters from the recent and distant past such as Mother Teresa, Sigmund Freud and Mary Magdalene, provide their unique perspective on his betrayal of Christ. The play explores how it is, that Judas has come to be regarded, both in the Gospels and Church tradition, as beyond redemption. Like any good playwright, Guirgis asks more questions than he answers but as well as causing me to guffaw hoarsely throughout my morning in bed, he moved me and made me think. Both the film and the play, made me question how much dramatic licence should be taken with historical events, especially when they have been set down in sacred scripture. Shakespeare never allowed the facts of history to get in the way of a good story, such as Richard III for example. Perhaps as a result of this, his art reveals the human condition more profoundly than the pedantic chronicles of a medieval historian like Holinshed. But is the Bible different? Should artists be more circumspect, when using Holy Writ as their source material?

Well, strangely enough, the writers of the Gospels themselves did not seem to think so! When they write about the death of Christ, or even the Resurrection, they apparently ignore key elements of their primary sources, such as pre-existing gospels and oral tradition, in order to develop their own unique slant on events. St. John, for example, even goes as far to ignore the generally accepted day of Christ’s crucifixion, so as to present him as the Passover Lamb- slain along with the animal sacrifices on the day of preparation. (the day before Good Friday). Matthew appears to embroider the first starkly documented account of Christ’s death in St. Mark , with tales of earthquakes and bodies erupting from graves. The last words of Christ from The Cross in Matthew are subtly, but significantly altered too, so as to give a fresh new emphasis according to the overall theme of his particular Gospel. So Mark, who paints the darkest picture of Christ’s death, reports only that one cry of dereliction from The Cross: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ -and describes how, with a loud cry Jesus 'breathes his last.’ (Literally, ‘expires’) Matthew building on this original source material writes more positively how Jesus ‘gave up his spirit,’ while Luke has him still more purposefully say, ‘Father into Your hands I commend my spirit.’ John, the fourth of the evangelists, puts the most triumphal spin on the narrative, when he reports how Christ uttered ‘It is finished’ before ‘giving up the ghost.’ One might go as far as to say the Gospel writers are each taking artistic licence! This in no way invalidates their testimony. The point is that the gospels are far more than factual reports from the front-line. They are concerned with more than a blow by blow account of events. They are theological reflections, written many years after the actual event, and with a particular target audience in mind. John’s Gospel may have been written around half a century after Christ’s death, at a time of intense persecution for the church. His Gospel reflects a point in Church history when Christians were being thrown out of the Synagogues and brought before the Jewish authorities. John understandably wants to emphasize Christ’s victory at the precise moment of apparent defeat, to inspire his brothers and sisters with a vision of faith and hope in the face of death. If we subject these great artistic and theological writings to the somewhat reductive frame-work of historical documentation, we end up contorting our logical minds to make the different accounts tie up. There are plenty more incongruities in the Gospel accounts of the life of Christ if we look closely. However, the artist (and so too the theologian) shapes her material to get at truths beneath the surface of events. How can the evangelists (or anyone else)be absolutely sure what Christ said or didn’t say from the Cross on that bleakest of Friday afternoons? Even if they could, these enigmatic and resonant utterances of Christ would be open to a thousand possible interpretations. Yet God inspired the writers to recount the event, not so much by jogging the memory of eye witnesses, but by touching the theological imaginations and spiritual insight of the writers, as they sifted through their material. Somehow, guided by the Spirit, each of the four writers finds a unique way of penetrating the mystery of the most significant moment in human history. Their writings coax us to enter the scenes imaginatively. They help us feel the oppressive darkness descending on the bare hill of Calvary, as Christ hangs from the rough-hewn beam, to hear the shrieks of mockery from the crowds gathered there, to smell the sour vinegar dripping from the sponge offered to the thirsty victim, and to see the blood trickle down his contorted face from the crown of thorns. They transport us to the foot of the Cross and so transform us, as they expose the heart of darkness at the core of our fallen humanity. Luke’s description of the people leaving Golgotha beating their breasts, is there to prompt our own grief and remorse- to bring us to our knees!

Artists throughout the ages, from Bach to Francis Bacon, have taken whatever license their artistic integrity has allowed them, to explore the mystery of Christ’s life and Passion. The Spirit continues, in every generation, to inspire fresh revelations of a story that is inexhaustible. We must be careful not to turn such mystery into a tract, and stifle our creative response to this greatest story ever told. Norman Stone’s aforementioned film is a wonderful meditation on the life of Christ, which is both disturbing and confrontational, as his assortment of shifty characters peer at us through the camera. Like the Gospels themselves, the film challenges us. How far have we accepted or rejected Christ? What tale might we tell at the end of our live? What will become of us. Guirgis’s play about Judas is less orthodox, and yet equally valid. He too challenges us with awkward questions. Why are we so apt to find a scapegoat for the death of Jesus of Nazareth, when Scripture reminds us that each one of us is vulnerable to the temptation to betray and succumb to despair like Judas? How far can we imagine redemption, for history’s notorious villains? Why are we so quick to judge other’s failure, and so slow to confess to our own weaknesses? These are very real questions for the whole of humanity. We should be grateful for artists who nag us with such crucial issues. We might do better to engage with their artistic vision and imagination, rather than question their spiritual authority and integrity- as the church has been inclined to do in the past. The artist has all too often been revealed as the prophet whose message went ignored!

For further information on these and other arts events at St. John’s during Lent, go to http://www.thespaceproject.org/

Sharing the Darkness

2009-01-30T07:04:00.000-08:00

I was in a meeting over at the church hall to discuss some of the practical issues arising from our latest arts project, “Visions in the Wilderness.” This ambitious project includes six events on consecutive Saturdays through this coming season of Lent, including a film night, classical concert, art exhibition, some drama, and something called ‘Captured Voices.’ This is billed as a Poetry Recital and Procession which actually sounds a little quaint now I come to write about it. I hope it is anything but! The title ‘Captured Voices’ is borrowed from a poetry anthology by ex-hostage and news reporter John Mc Carthy. After returning from Beirut where he was held as hostage he compiled this collection from the writings of fellow victims of torture and injustice around the world. Before stumbling on the book in my school library, I had the idea of developing the Catholic ritual of ‘walking the Stations of the Cross’ for one of the arts events, using poems rather than images as the stimulus. I wanted to focus less on Christ’s historical journey to Golgotha, and more on contemporary characters who were suffering around the world today. After all Christ is especially visible in the suffering of the marginalized and persecuted according to the Holy Scriptures. I wanted to illustrate the fourteen poems or 'stations' with small art installations to provide a visual focus for each piece of writing. For example, I might display a pile of copies of 'The Big Issue' resting on a plinth along with an old harmonica for Peter Kavanagh's poem 'Street Corner Christ.' Once the fourteen poems had been heard by the congregation, they could move from station to station re-reading them, as they would be displayed by the installations. However a couple of folk at the meeting did not initially share my enthusiasm, having read through the poems. ‘It’s all a bit grim,’ they said. ‘Where’s the hope?’ Where indeed?

For Christians, poetry and art in general, can provoke some awkward questions. We want to come across with passion and conviction to those groping for answers in the spiritual wilderness of the twenty first century. Yet the function of art is to reflect life 'warts and all!' It holds ‘a mirror up to nature’ according to Hamlet, and if it is to project a true and profound image of life for it's audience, then it will ultimately reveal the complexity, ambivalence and apparent contradictions at the heart of the human condition, whether we like that or not. The poems I have chosen, from Blake to Rilke, to the Nigerian Ken Saro-Wiwa (executed in 1995) are grim indeed! Blake’s London echoes with ‘the youthful harlot’s curse’ and ‘the infant’s cry of fear.’ Rilke sees how in the ‘lost’ and ‘rotting’ cities ‘children waste their days/ on doorsteps always in the same shadow,’ while Saro-Wiwa writing about the compliance of citizens with the dictatorships which govern them, highlights the ‘Cowardice masking as obedience/Lurking in our degenerated souls.’

My response to the concerns of my colleagues, was to assert that a true Christian response to the misery of human suffering was to listen first and foremost to the victims; to share the darkness with them, as the Christian activist Sheila Cassidy once wrote. Art enables us to do this most intently, whether we stand before Picasso’s ‘Guernica,’ listen to Samuel Barber’s "Adadgio for Strings,"or walk "The Stations of the Cross". Such contemplation as this, becomes a form of prayer. Aristotle, the original art critic, recognized its profound spiritual nature, when he described the cathartic impact of Greek Tragedy. The initial horror and pity he felt in the theatre, as an actor narrated the self mutilation of Oedipus and the suicide of Jocasta when they discover the truth of their incestuous union, left Aristotle strangely uplifted when he finally left the auditorium in the gathering gloom. Perhaps he percieved a deeper intimacy between the vast Athenian crowd as they silently returned to their homes sharing the darkness both literally and metaphorically. I remember something like this at the end of Spielberg's masterpiece 'Schindler's List' in Edinburgh several years ago. As the credits rolled no one moved. There was an intensity in the cinema which was profoundly spiritual. No one wanted to break the bond that had been established witnessing the horror of The Holocaust together and the heroic struggle of Oscar Schindler to somehow take a stand against this tide of evil. We are so desensitized by the mental clutter of our busy lives. We so desparately need to be still and feel both the agony and the ecstasy of the human condition. This intensity of feeling, according to Aristotle, is not a negative or indulgent experience but a positive ritualistic purging of our souls. It is a cleansing which restores us. Oedipus's blindness leads him to enlightenment at the Greek city of Colonus as St.Paul's did once he reached Damascus.

True hope is not found in trite platitudes served up by Christians or anyone else, however noble our intentions. It may, however, grow almost imperceptibly like a tender shoot- even in the bleakest of landscapes. The joy of Easter morning was felt only once the horror of Good Friday had been experienced. Walking through the season of Lent which culminates in the horror and pity of Holy Week with its betrayals and brutality should indeed be cathartic. "Visions in the Wilderness" is at St.John's Church Broadbridge Heath -W.Sussex from February 28th -April 5th. It is an opportunity for believers and agnostics to encounter the God who walks with us through the desert, all the way to the promised land.

A Space for Something to Grow

2009-01-23T06:08:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday night I met up for a drink with my friend and collaborator on The Space Project, Simon Machin. 'Space' is a faith based arts initiative, which has grown out of the life of our local Anglican Church in West Sussex http://www.thespaceproject.org/ Simon and I are collaborating on a new play about the poet Christina Rossetti. Simon, who works in finance, has never written a full length play before and is understandably apprehensive. I feel similarly ill-equipped as his mentor, having only written a one-act drama before. He is to write the script, and I am to direct and act in the play, with my mother, the actress Beth Ellis, playing Rossetti. So yes we are a little daunted, and hence the excuse for a drink to help us to invoke the muse. Simon and I have had a fair few drinks in our brief friendship thus far. I fluctuate between coffees and pints of coke in our Sussex locals, which does nothing for my sleep, whilst Simon agonizes over the choice of ales. In this time we have forged a deep friendship and creative partnership as we have sought to nurture this fledgling arts project together. From this evolving relationship, creative ideas seem to surface from some mysterious place and slowly materialize in the space between us. Saturday was a particular example of this. There we were pooling our ignorance, fumbling for a way forward from Simon's promising but as yet unformed scribblings, when our 'muse' seemingly pulled up a seat and inspired us with an exciting new approach to our play. As we relaxed into the warmth of our friendship, ideas began to flow.

The performing arts are essentially collaborative. A play, for example, involves writer, director, actors, designers, technical team, not to mention the audience. The work evolves from the inter-action between these key players, over a short but highly pressurized period of time. We depend on one another to help create a space where something can grow; a creative space where our guards can come down and our imaginations may soar. We need to feel sufficiently relaxed in each other's company to aim for the stars, and take the risk of looking foolish if we fall flat on our face in the process. When we are anxious to please, or avoid offending others, our body tenses up, our imagination goes into spasm, and our wild brain-children are aborted! Suddenly we see the other as a rival or disapproving parent, and we don't want to come out to play anymore. Sadly the working relationships we forge in our 'dog-eat-dog' culture, inhibit our creativity more often than stimulate it. We experience the crippling tensions of trying to appear efficient, productive, and 'come up with the goods,' to use a ghastly capitalist cliche. Creating art is not about manufacturing products, and it requires a different climate and another language to inspire its processes.

The Space Project, as I said earlier, has grown out of the life of a Christian Church. It is, I suppose, a 'family affair' which runs on good will, common values, and through relationships which have been refined in the intense heat of sharing our lives week by week. The relationships between members of our church drama group, have been intensified further still, by collaborating artistically over the past few years on The Space Project. When we work creatively on a play together, we reveal (or perhaps attempt to conceal) something profound about ourselves. Either way we are ultimately forced, or maybe coaxed, out into the open, in a way which rarely happens in our day to day life, even within the church. It takes time for relationships to mature to the extent that we can really relax with one another and express ourselves openly. Working together as artists can fast-track this process, provided it is earthed by a robust humour, and a willingness to let go of our so-called dignity! So The Space Project, with its emphasis on creative collaboration flowing out of open, authentic relationships, is hopefully reflecting a counter-cultural way of life to the church and society at large.

Dance of Redemption

2009-01-18T07:42:00.001-08:00

I am currently directing some A’ Level Theatre Studies students in a production of ‘Our Country’s Good’ by Timberlake Wertenbaker. The play, which is about the first convicts to be transported to Australia in the 1700’s, has become something of a modern classic since it was first staged at The Royal Court Theatre in 1988. The story tells how the newly appointed Governor of the penal colony appoints one of his officers to direct the convicts in George Farquhar’s fashionable comedy ‘The Recruiting Officer.’ He believes this will help to rehabilitate them during their sentence. His social experiment is supported by the officer who has been holding the auditions: ‘In my own small way, in just a few hours, I have seen something change. I asked some of the convict women to read me some lines, these women who behave no better than animals. And it seemed to me, as one or two-I’m not saying all of them, not at all-but one or two, saying those well-balanced lines of Mr. Farquhar, they seemed to acquire a dignity, they seemed-they seemed to lose some of their corruption.’ By the end of ‘Our Country’s Good,’ despite the opposition of many of the officers, the prisoners rehearsing the play have become transformed- both individually and as a community. One of the convicts, a shy and fragile soul, gives us some insight into how acting has stretched and challenged her in such a beneficial way. As she rehearses her central role in the comedy, she says to her friend Dabby: ‘How can I play Silvia? She’s brave and strong. She couldn’t have done what I’ve done.’ Dabby tries to reassure her: ‘You can pretend you’re her.’ But Mary will have none of it: ‘No I have to be her…Because that’s acting.’ Another convict declares toward the end, ‘When I speak Kite’s lines, I don’t hate anymore.’ Lest we dismiss Wertenbaker’s play as liberal propaganda, she includes some letters at the front of the Methuen addition of the play, from contemporary prisoners. Each writes movingly of the impact of doing drama while serving their sentence. One such man puts it very well. ‘Prison is about failure normally, and how we are reminded of it every day. Drama and self-expression in general, is a refuge and one of the only real weapons against the hopelessness of these places.’

As a drama teacher I frequently see the impact it has on people’s lives in many tangible ways- albeit in a less highly charged environment. I was directing one of the students in the role of the aggressive, street-wise convict Liz Morden this week. Jessamy is a nice middle-class girl who’s rather shy and she was clearly feeling a bit self-concious playing the part. We began to explore the body language of this high-status criminal. I encouraged Jessamy to hold eye-contact with the other performers, look them up and down in a slow, measured way, and to move very deliberately into their personal space. The transformation was instantaneous and the other students cackled with glee at the ‘new’ Jessamy before them. Jessamy found playing this rather dangerous convict strangely liberating. Perhaps it helped her express her shadow side which she’d been conditioned to keep in check over the years. She seemed to relish being powerful, dangerous, even sexy for once, rather than the demure goodie-goodie persona Jessamy is inclined to project in class.

An even more positive example of the therapeutic properties of drama was demonstrated last week, as I was directing the lower sixth in their AS production of the Greek Tragedy, ‘The Trojan Women’. The play explores the desperate struggle of the captured Trojans to make sense of their horrific fate as prisoners of war. They cry out to the gods to help them but to no avail. It is poignant at this time of the Israeli attack on Gaza. A very obvious challenge for these post-modern/secularized students, is how to connect with the sacred rituals of the ancient Trojans, without resorting to theatrical clichés. I did the usual trick of playing some moody music and got the students to work in pairs, mirroring each other’s movements until they began to lose themselves in the simple physical communion established between them. I then asked them to form a circle and asked the student playing the prophetess Cassandra to lead the rest of the group in a simple sequence of movements, in response to a sublime track from Wellspring's CD ‘Ancient Paths’. The student did this very sensitively before coming to a place of intense stillness and silence. I then encouraged them to speak out words of praise for Troy and the gods and the simple pleasures of their every day existence as a Trojan (assuming that this was before the Greeks had invaded their land.) The impact was very moving, and afterwards one of the students said how the things the characters had given praise for were still utterly relevant today. She had, perhaps for the first time in her life, discovered the universal impulse to worship . As we develop such spontaneous rituals over the coming rehearsal period, I believe the students will awaken their dormant spirituality in a very exciting way. Sadly there is very little other forum for this, in our highly secularized school.

All of which brings me to the title of this blog and the point I am trying to make. On Friday we took our two daughters to see the musical ‘Billy Elliot’ in London. As you probably know the story is about a twelve year old working-class lad from a mining community in county Durham, who discovers a passion for ballet- much to the horror of his bigoted Dad and older brother. On the morning that he has secretly arranged to audition for the Royal Ballet School, they find out and stop him attending. Billy’s distress at seeing his dreams torn to shreds is juxtaposed with the menacing advance of the riot-police toward an imaginary picket line of striking miners. With their truncheons beating wildly against their fibreglass shields, they move as one man towards the audience- leaving Billy sandwiched between. (see picture). The oppression of the mining community, is being equated with the father’s tyranny over his son’s ‘unacceptable’ quest for self-expression.

Later in the musical, Billy is alone in the local community hall late on Christmas eve. He has told his best friend that he has ‘packed-in the ballet.’ As he sits brooding about missed opportunities, Billy notices a cassette recorder in the middle of the hall and shoves in his tape of Swan-Lake. Inevitably his love for dance is rekindled, and he begins to move gracefully around the hall. The moment evolves into a sort of dream sequence, in which a grown up version of himself enters the space and leads him in a glorious pas de deux which culminates in the young Billy flying up high towards the lighting rig in an image of freedom and transcendence. This musical adaptation of the film is very clever in the way that it employs a whole range of dance routines as a metaphor for both personal and collective freedom and redemption. We see great burly miners, squads of riot-police, even Billy’s decrepit grandmother, telling their stories through hilariously incongruous choreography. At the curtain call there is an extra finale in which the whole cast including Billy’s Dad and brother, prance around in frilly tutus with utter glee and abandonment. The production leaves us with the profound truth, that beyond the socially conditioned roles we adopt-roles which so often lead to personal constriction and social conflict, there is a universal huger to come together and express who we really are. That is perhaps what true worship is partly about and this wonderful finale, which the performers clearly adore, provided the audience with a glimpse of Heaven. Authentic spirituality and uninhibited artistic expression are both powerful means to help individuals and communities leave the masquerade of social posturing, and discover 'the glorious liberty of the children of God.'

As I continue to develop the creative and performing arts within my local Anglican congregation and my school, I shall look and pray for more of the same!

For more information about the Christian Arts Ministry I lead at St. John's Broadbridge Heath, go to http://www.thespaceproject.org/

The Space We Share- Christian Theatre for a Post-Modern Age

2009-01-09T13:11:00.000-08:00

Around five years ago I started something in my local Anglican Church called The Space Drama Project. The main idea was to create theatre which grew directly from the faith and creativity of members of the congregation and which might enrich the church and the wider community in our post modern age. I hoped to bring together people from a diversity of backgrounds and beliefs for that unique shared experience of live theatre.

The Space Project was so named to reflect the fact that theatre uses space as its primary medium of communication; a stage surrounded by an audience.

The first theatres in ancient Greece were simply large stone circles normally used for threshing corn at harvest time. From this primitive arena it grew into a vast civic auditorium by the 5th century BC holding 20,000 citizens. The drama festivals of Athens became a central building block for one of the greatest civilizations since the dawn of time. These vast auditoriums reflected the Athenian notion of democracy. The amphitheatre became a shared space for both the actors and the audience with people viewing the action from multiple angles offering each citizen a unique perspective on the action unfolding in the circular arena below. The theatre was for the citizen a place where the great questions of life could be openly debated where the mysteries of the universe might be explored and experienced through the power of the drama.

Over the centuries, theatre has changed; in many ways for the worse! Theatres are much smaller today and tend to segregate the audience into distinct sections; stalls, circle, dress circle, the boxes, each at different prices. Audiences have been increasingly distanced from the stage by orchestra pits, curtains, and darkened auditoriums. Moreover, in most West-End theatres, the seats are all angled end on to the performers, rather than surrounding them as of old. So, it has been argued, theatre has become a more manipulative medium over the years relegating the audience to the role of passive consumers. We are sold a product at a price, spun a yarn that leaves them, both literally and metaphorically, in the dark!

All this has probably influenced my choice of staging regarding the latest production at The Space. This is a dramatic adaptation of Christina Rossetti's folkloric poem, Goblin Market, which tells the story of the seduction of a young maid by Goblins from the nearby glade. It has also made me reflect on how the kind of space you create for an audience, profoundly affects their experience in the theatre and to consider how a Christian theatre company such as ours might communicate more effectively with an audience in a post-modern age. This is a culture which mistrusts absolute Truth, but rather celebrates the dialogue generated from apparently conflicting versions of truth in a pluralist society

We have decided to perform Goblin Market in our new community hall, rather than the church, and to create an intimate theatre in the round. (See above for an example.) This means the actors will be surrounded on all sides by their audience. The size and shape of such an auditorium means that everyone has a ring-side seat and everyone is in a more direct relationship with each other, creating a virtual community within the hall, for whom the space is shared rather than segregated. It also means the action and story is viewed from diverse perspectives, reflecting the multiplicity of meanings which resonate from the drama. It means we have less control as story tellers to manipulate the audiences response, since every image we create will be seen from several angles at once. This also diminishes my control as director over the performers since there is no single frame within which to position the actors for a particular effect. They are freer to roam!

All this suits both the company and audience very well, since great art thrives on ambiguity, complexity and conflict. An audience doesn't like to be spoon-fed ideas or a simplistic story-line, but wants to be given space to piece the puzzle together for themselves. A great film or novel, for example, leaves us with many questions about the characters, the plot, and the picture of the world it has reflected. It shows us the story and characters unfolding from a range of angles, constantly shifting our perspective. It stirs us up to question our assumptions about truth, and makes us rethink our beliefs. (This explains why in many dictatorships the arts are considered to be dangerously subversive leading to censorship, the burning of books, and closing of theatres.)

However, some Christians have been concerned by the emerging ideologies of post-modernism because they appear to be undermining a faith which celebrates one absolute creed, rather than multiple versions of truth. It is, after all, a monotheisitic faith mediated by one saviour, through his one perfect sacrifice. Nevertheless other believers, including artists like myself, increasingly feel that some post-modern ideas can inspire and inform both our theology and our art.

Take, for example, this notion of multiple versions of the truth, or at least multiple perspectives. Have you ever wondered why we need four gospels to depict the life of Christ? Why do they differ not only in style, but sometimes on quite significant details? One reason is that each writer views the story through their unique cultural lens, whilst seeking to reflect the concerns of their particular target audience. They have a different perspective. They are, as it were, sitting on different sides of our theatre in the round.

I was reading Ian Boxhall’s excellent study of the New Testament recently, and he explained how Mark’s gospel reflects a more localized, Jewish perspective on the ministry of Jesus, so that he writes about him teaching by the sea of Galilee. Whereas the much traveled Luke, who had sailed the vast Mediterranean with St.Paul, describes it more accurately as an inland lake. Yet Mark’s vision of the life of Christ was nourished by a familiarity with the Jewish scriptures, where the sea symbolizes the realm of chaos and evil. So, perhaps Mark has a particular agenda, when depicting Christ teaching from a boat on this highly symbolic stretch of water early on in his gospel, and later stilling the storm there too. He wants to emphasize Christ's power over the forces of darkness. In contrast Luke is keen to provide a more factual, geographic account, for his more cosmopolitan audience. Both have something important to contribute to the portrait of Christ.

It is very challenging for Christians to bare witness to the gospel, in an increasingly pluralist society. There are so few people at work, in our neighborhoods or in the media who seem to share our world view. They see things differently. Even within the Anglican Communion, just one denomination of many, there are conflicting interpretations of what the Bible has to say about a range of contemporary issues. It is always tempting to assume my view point is the most valid, the more biblical, orthodox, or compassionate, rather than to try to see life from another’s perspective. The result can be that I become more entrenched in my one perspective, and increasingly hostile to any other. At its worst, this has resulted in violence, bigotry, and other such attitudes which fracture communities and lead to war. Even at best it may lead me to close my mind to new ways of seeing the world.

The arts, and perhaps theatre in particular, due to its multi-dimensional space, encourage multiple perspectives as a way of encountering the complexity of the human condition. They highlight the limitations of single mindedness. Their way of seeing is more often both-and rather than either-or. They draw us into fruitful dialogue, rather than coerce us into a particular point of view. These virtues, it may be argued, are increasingly embraced by our post-modern culture.

The church can benefit enormously by embracing the arts, and its way of exploring truth, if it is to make any headway in the mission field of contemporary society. I hope and pray, that the work of the Space Drama Project and our forthcoming ‘in the round’ production of ‘Goblin Market’ draw the post-modern skeptics into a fruitful dialogue with the Christian faith. May it also coax the more conservative theologians into an open engagement with contemporary culture? May we all gather together in a theatre in the round, sharing one space, viewed from diverse angles. Your kingdom come!
Publish Post

God Made Flesh

2008-12-27T03:59:00.000-08:00

Since I wrote my first blog before Christmas I have been, with my friend and artistic collaborator Simon, to the Francis Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain. I do not go to art exhibitions much, as I am put off by my own ignorance and so I rarely know where to begin in a vast gallery of images. It helps to focus on just one particular artist, however, and also to use the excellent audio guides which deconstruct specific paintings. The exhibition was also very helpfully arranged to provide both a chronological and thematic journey of Bacon's work including a room set apart to offer insight into the artist's working method's and source materials.

Bacon in common with many of his contemporary artists was profoundly influenced by the brutality of the 20th century and in particular the horrors of the concentration camps. At some point in his life he had a kind of epiphany when passing dog excrement on the pavement. He felt then that human life amounted to little more than this. Yet rather than inhibiting his artistic energy, this nihilistic vision of life apparently galvanized him and he tackled grand subjects in stikingly original ways throughout his career. His Three Studies for a Crucifixion painted in 1962 is a vast triptych with each panel showing the victim as little more than butchered meat. The images are as messy, undignified and apparently inconseqential, as the turd on the pavement; as brutal as the photographs which emerged from the death camps after the war. Bacon distills the great moment of salvation history down to its sheer physical essence. Yet he sees beauty in the butchery as he did in all human wounds. Most importantly he aims to stop you in your tracks and make you contemplate something of the revolting reality of the crucifixion before you have time to formulate an intellectual response. This is the great gift of art, especially with regard to a subject that is for many of us all too familiar. Somehow life equips us with filters which distance us from discomforting subjects, especially human suffering. Religion, for example, can become one such filter preventing us from really contemplating and engaging with reality. We sometimes take refuge in its grand themes and dogmas as a way of distracting ourselves from that which we find hard to understand or accept.

Art makes the familiar appear strange, unsettling us, and so awakening us from the deadly slumber of escapism or indifference. Bacon regarded himself as an atheist and regarded the crucifixion as no more than another example of man's inhumanity to man. Yet for me, God speaks powerfully through Bacon's art regardless of this, making me feel first of all, and then question, his vision of the cross. Was he right? When the carols fade and our homes are stripped of decorations is there any more to look forward to than our own mortality? Certainly the coming year will witness many such acts of violence around the globe. Why? Was that which was done to Jesus of Nazareth so different? How? We cannot, ofcourse, prove this either way, but Bacon's painting illuminates for me the great truth of Christmas, if not of Easter. God was made flesh. Again I can all too easily see this as an abstact idea, rather than a physical reality. Bacon's crucifixion rams the reality home. Here is blood spattered on a pillow. There is the body with its ribs exposed, flesh like raw meat spilling from the carcass. Unwittingly Bacon has uncovered the God lost amidst the horror of the century in the graphic carnality of his triptytch.

So, stange as it seems, Bacon's gruesome Easter painting takes me deeper into the mystery of Christmas and the incarnation. God is beheld in the infants slaughtered by King Herod, or indeed Hitler, as well as the one lying on a bed of straw.

An Artist's God-Reflections on Spirituaity and The Arts

2008-12-18T06:51:00.000-08:00

In her book 'The New Atheists,' Tina Beattie discusses the objections Dawkins et al have towards the Christian concept of Intelligent Design. It is a comforting idea to imagine a God who has put together the universe with the precision of a watchmaker so as to ensure it fuctions efficiently, but it just doesn't fit the observable facts of our evolutionary world the scientists argue. There are too many flaws and random elements in nature which suggest if there was a God behind creation he was more of 'A Blind Watchmaker' to quote the title of one of Dawkins books. So in her final chapter Tina Beattie proposes a model for God drawn from the world of the arts. She suggests God may interact with His creation rather like the way an author or indeed any creative artist shapes their material. The artistic process for any actor, choreographer, composer, writer etc is a far more mysterious, organic one than that of 'intelligent design.' There may be an end in view but the more sensitive artist soon discovers that their material has a life of its own. The characters in the unfolding plot for example take their author, playwright or actor in unexpected directions which are often more interesting than the artist's original intentions. The really creative soul especially the genius is not discouraged by this but instead opens themselves up to the mystery of creativity trusting the often messy process to give birth to beauty. So we might encounter God more authentically with this model in mind and consider how our own artistic creativity could become central to the growth of our faith and humanity since we are made in His image.

I have taught A level Drama and Theatre Studies in one of the largest departments in the country and have established The Space Drama Project in my local Anglican Church in Broadbridge Heath, West Sussex. My aim is both simple and yet extremely complex; to stimulate creativity among the actors I work with whether in drama workshops or rehearsing for a production. By helping to release their creativity they increasingly discover their true selves as artist made in the image of God and give birth to all sorts of wonderously original material capable of moving total strangers to laughter or tears. A huge part of the challenge is nuturing my own creativity, otherwise it's the blind leading the blind or perhaps more accurately the boring leading the bored!! Infact in one of his books on the theatre, the director Peter Brook likens the process of directing actors in a play to a guide leading followers through a long dark tunnel with just a flaming torch to find the way. This analogy evokes the notion of religious faith and in particular words of St. Paul 'Now we see but a poor reflection as in a (dark) mirror' (my italics)

In my own journey as theatre director and as a Christian, I sense that God is teaching me to live and work more spontaneously,to work more blindly or intuitively. There is much resistance to this not least from within my own mind! I want to understand where I'm going, where it's all leading. Similarly those I lead want to pin things down , especially the A' Level students I work with. In the local church there is also an understandable concern to see the project fuilfil certain 'Mission' criteria as a means of outreach to the local community. Yet I have to be careful not to allow these subtle pressures for greater control from within or without to quench the Spirit who blows where she will. So as I rest from a wonderful year of creativity through drama both in my school and local church I think of the God from the book of Genesis who rests after creating the world. Perhaps if he didn't he would be tempted to govern his project in a more systematic way and thus end up with an efficient machine instead of this living installation which we are all such a unique and dynamic part of. In the next chapters of the Genesis narrative His creation does indeed take on a life of its own and God all but tears up the script in the story of the flood. But ultimately He doesn't and discovers that he has to work with his material as it is even to the point of entering His own narrative as Christ and experiencing it from the inside. That is part of the mystery of Christmas. It is a second creation, a second birth, a masterstroke by a genius who is infinately more interesting than an intelligent designer.