DAVID EDGAR’s new play, Written on the Heart, commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) last year for the Authorised Version anniversary, now reaches London from Stratford-upon-Avon (Features, 21 October).
A drama about Bible translation, set mainly in Shakespeare’s England, might seem like a natural fit in Warwickshire — just the type of educational piece that the RSC ought to be doing with its public money — but in the commercial and entertainment hub of the capital, it all feels more daring. Much of it focuses on why one word matters rather than another, and on the fruits of Reformation scholarship. Putting complex theological disputes on the West End stage is surely a risky move.
Edgar tells the story through Lancelot Andrewes, who meets his fellow translators in 1610 to finalise their deliberations, with glances back to his work in 1586, and to the earlier translator, William Tyndale, on the brink of his execution in 1536. The first half sets up the situation, drawing out what is at stake. The second half weaves the various threads together, summoning Tyndale’s ghost to confront Andrewes (the figure being “an effusion of my mind”, the latter admits).
Here, in the tense duel between the two great translators, the play really catches fire. As the characters parry quotations, they tussle over the potential of the elevated as distinct from the colloquial style, and over the via media between the popish and the puritan.
So we have Tyndale arguing that the AV translators have worked “To sacrifice the clear to the majestic. . . To sacrifice the meaning to the music. . . To snatch God’s word from seamstresses and ploughboys and hand it back to bishops.” Andrewes counters: “What, you would have us novelists, and ape the blabber of the town?”
The audience was strangely warmed, too: for some, their hearts so burned within them that they chanted the words of scripture alongside the actors, audibly moved. But flames have all too literal a place in the stories that crackle away in the characters’ minds and souls, as they tell of friends dying at the stake for their confession of faith.
The actors playing Andrewes and Tyndale dominate with compelling performances: as the former, Oliver Ford Davies wearily bears the burden of unity (and reprises the role of tortured cleric that he embodied so consummately as Lionel, the main character of David Hare’s Racing Demon, back in the early 1990s). As Tyndale, Stephen Boxer blazes with fervour and barely restrained anger, but maintains his measured argument.
The steadily paced and understated direction by Gregory Doran, the company’s artistic director-designate, manages the complex material with admirable clarity. Despite a few almost inevitable awkward moments, when characters remind each other what each already knows, Edgar gracefully sidesteps the spectre of a worthy pageant. Rather, he kindles an atmosphere of fervent contention in a number of two-handed scenes; and he embodies the conflict in the character of Andrewes.
So he fashions an excellent history lesson, fleshing out how and why these debates are not just academic concerns, but why they matter, then and now. Thus the debate crackles into life, and Andrewes incarnates the two sides in his inner turmoil, struggling between guilt over his supposed betrayal of puritan colleagues, and personal ambition (there being much amused speculation about who will be the next Archbishop of Canterbury in 1610).
In another delightfully topical twist, the production manages to make up Bruce Alexander, who plays the Bishop of London, as a dead ringer for Richard Chartres. He is named for the archbishopric.
The playwright toys with more dramatic irony towards the end, where he introduces both William Laud and the future Charles I, and a whiff of the civil war in the decades that follow. But, throughout, he focuses more on the simmering question how far to take the Reformation. Is it a case of “thus far and no further”, or of the growing maturity of the faithful, who, in the sense of 1 Corinthians 13, “put away childish things”?
It may be bold to present a play about theology amid the glitzier attractions of Theatreland, but the piece belongs here, within a mile or two of its setting in Holborn and of other places mentioned (Stationers’ Hall and Smithfield are among them).
Despite his being an atheist, Edgar has crafted a piece teeming with religious ideas, which flares into life with its insistence on the need for the fire within the soul: it might just as well be called “Burned on the Heart”.
Written on the Heart runs at the Duchess Theatre, Catherine Street, London WC2, until 21 July. Box office: phone 0844 482 9672.
www.rsc.org.uk