Keeping the faith?
Why don’t more plays tackle religion? After all, it’s one of the burning issues of the day.
We have plays about sex. We have plays about politics. Rarely, however, do we see plays about religion. It’s the big unspoken subject of the British stage. I was reminded of this fact by an odd coincidence. Last month I went to see to Wyndham’s Theatre to see William Nicholson’s Shadowlands, one of the few modern plays to deal with faith and doubt. That same afternoon I’d also been interviewed for a Radio 4 programme about God dealing with the way He (or She) is represented in literature, art and drama. I was forced to admit that the devil not only has the best tunes, he also gets a lot more stage time than God.
For many of us the image of God is best personified by the sight of Brian Glover ascending on a fork-lift truck in Bill Bryden’s production of The Mysteries. But it’s fascinating to remember that those same Mystery plays were banned by Henry VIII as “living proof of Catholic doctrine”, and from 1737 to 1968 the absurd censorship of the Lord Chamberlain prevented the representation of God, Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary on the British stage. In America, Marc Connelly in Green Pastures was allowed to show God smoking ten-cent cigars in a fish-fry. But here, God could neither be shown nor even blasphemously denied. When Hamm in Beckett’s Endgame cried “the bastard! He doesn’t exist!”, the words had to be doctored for local consumption.
This may be one reason why religion has so long been absent from the British stage, although it didn’t stop Christian dramatists TS Eliot and Christopher Fry writing plays like Murder in the Cathedral and The Boy with a Cart. There was also the difficult matter of how, even if it were possible, you would represent God theatrically. Kenneth Tynan once wrote that, if he were to accept an anthropormophic deity, “I would find it entirely credible that the creator of the universe as we know it was someone very like Sir Ralph Richardson.” But not many actors are born to play God; and, as CS Lewis observed, “We have long abandoned belief in a God who sits on a throne in a localised heaven.”
Mention of Lewis brings me to Shadowlands: not a great play but one that deals touchingly with Lewis’ late-flowering love for the dying Joy Gresham and that raises all kinds of serious issues. Why does a supposedly benevolent God allow us to suffer so much? Is pain an inevitable by-product of happiness? Is the substantial world we inhabit no more than a mere shadowland? You may not, unless you are a committed believer, accept Lewis’ answers to these questions. But one reason, I suspect, for the play’s continuing popularity is that it raises questions about the meaning of life we are simply not used to hearing on our militantly secular stage.
What I’m suggesting is that dramatists – be they Christian, Muslim or Hindu, atheist or agnostic – should no longer exclude religion from dramatic discussion. I don’t underestimate the problems: we all remember the terrible fate that greeted Bezhti in Birmingham and the problems encountered by Jerry Springer – The Opera on tour. But it seems to me that we are ignoring a vital topic in treating either organised religion or spiritual issues as no-go areas. There have been occasional exceptions: David Hare’s Racing Demon dealing with Anglican schisms, Howard Brenton’s Paul, Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Equus and Amadeus, which all touch in different ways on the nature of divinity. Significantly though, it’s been largely left to musicals like Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar and even Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat to present religion on stage. What have our dramatists to say about one of the burning issues of our time? The answer, it would seem, is that God alone knows.
