BROADWAY to Holloway, in north London, may not be quite the trajectory that playwrights dream of, but Murray Watts is full of positivity about the transformation of his new work, The Beloved Son, from an eight-actor play premièring at New York’s Sheen Centre, to a one-man show that will be presented to an invited audience tomorrow at St Luke’s, Upper Holloway.
Commissioned by the Henri Nouwen Society in autumn 2019, the original dramatisation of the life of the 20th-century priest, psychologist, and academic was torpedoed by the pandemic. Mr Watts describes March 2020 “as a series of doors closing behind me”, as rehearsals with the New York neurodiverse cast were stopped, Broadway theatres closed down, and he scrambled for a transatlantic flight to his home, Freswick Castle, in north Scotland.
A long career in screenwriting, with its ruthless “kill your darlings” attitude to superfluous material, and a track record as writer and director of one-man shows about Charles Darwin and Michael Faraday helped Mr Watts to see The Beloved Son’s potential for solo performance.
He has also been a long-term collaborator with the actor Andrew Harrison, who will be touring the show. And, simple as they are to stage, solo performances are in tune with post-pandemic theatre’s straitened finances. “In a sense, you do what you can as an artist, as an actor, as a painter, as a musician.”
Mr Watts emphasises that The Beloved Son is not a documentary about Nouwen, but a play inspired by his life. “The names have been changed of the individuals that have inspired the play, for obvious reasons. So, there’s some artistic licence going on, but it’s also just protecting people. And it’s my version of events.
“We live in a world of Marvel films, which have endless special effects. And the great thing about the opposite end of the scale, which is a one-man show, is: it’s pure imagination. It’s pure space, it’s absolutely unalloyed storytelling. You’re almost gathering around the imaginary fireside.”
The play addresses the deepest human concerns, he says: “It’s also about the journey of life and death and confronting mortality, which is not a subject that is easy to address. And that’s a profound part of this play.”
IN THE 1990s, Nouwen’s books were at the height of popularity, and no Lenten course was complete without studying his work on the Prodigal Son, with Rembrandt’s celebrated painting on the cover — although Mr Watts concedes: “Nouwen wrote the same book 40 times — variations on a theme, shall we say.”
Besides exploring Nouwen’s downward social-mobility arc from feted Ivy League academic to helper at L’Arche Daybreak community for people with intellectual disabilities, the playwright also provides insight into Nouwen’s personal and psychological dilemmas.
“Henri was a Catholic priest with a profound sense of duty and honour. And he wasn’t wanting to break his vows, and not be celibate or start relationships. But there was a neediness in him which he admits and talks about in a moving way in many of his books. He was hugely loved by people around the world, but many of his friends recall his neediness,” Mr Watts says.
“He would ring people up in the middle of the night, forgetting time differences, and be in some awful emotional state. And he needed love and affirmation. And there was a particular friendship with a younger man who was kind and thoughtful and bright and inspiring to Henri, and it wasn’t reciprocated in any way. The person concerned would go on to marry and have a family.
Henri Nouwen“It was a friendship Henri found difficult to negotiate. It stirred up feelings and longings which any single person, and certainly any priest, would understand; any celibate person would understand that.
“You don’t stop having very deep longings because you’ve taken vows. You’re putting those longings into the hands of God, but they’re very real and very raw. It turned him upside down for a while. It was a sort of emotional chaos which revealed longing, and, ultimately, it’s only in the love of God that we can actually find our true home. The first love in our life, it’s the love of God, and every other love is secondary. All human relationships and longings, desires, and hopes can only be seen in the light of this first love.”
Meeting Nouwen at Greenbelt in the 1990s, Mr Watts was struck by the way the priest could transcend the different outlooks in contemporary Christianity and be inclusive to all: “After Henri’s death at the age of 64 from a heart attack, there was a requiem mass, and Protestant or non-Catholic people were not allowed to take communion. There were people who thought that was completely at variance with Henri Nowen’s overview, he was totally inclusive. He held everybody together.”
BORN to a Plymouth Brethren mother and Baptist father, and brought up, first, in the Presbyterian Church, Mr Watts found Nouwen’s assurance of God’s love a contrast to the austere faith of his childhood.
“Coming out of an Evangelical Protestant background, one of the issues for you is this feeling of having to earn God’s love,” he says. “It’s one of the great ironies of the Evangelical tradition that a great deal is said about grace, but you spend the rest of your life trying to earn God’s favour, working yourself to the bone almost to kind of impress God or do the right thing.
“Resting in the knowledge that you’re the beloved son yourself, a beloved child of God, was foreign to me. I had loving parents, but still there was in the air this idea, in the Reformer’s phrase, of the total and utter depravity of humanity: this idea of original badness, rather than the understanding that your life starts long before you were born in the intimate embrace of God, and it will be ending in the intimate embrace of God long after you die. You will continue always in being the beloved.
“Nouwen was touching on the concept of our original goodness: ‘God saw what he had made and it was very good.’ That wasn’t the tradition I had around me, growing up; so, suddenly finding this idea of being the beloved, no matter what — that was the key to my identity, and what drew me to Henri’s writing.”
The joint commission from the Henri Nouwen Society and Sheen Centre made the perfect fit, he believes. “So, when I was asked to write the play, I thought, yes, this is something I can identify with, and do some justice to this extraordinary insight.”
Having read history of art at Cambridge, Mr Watts faced a fork-in-the-road choice on graduation, between pursuing a secure, academic career by studying for a Ph.D. supervised by Hans Rookmaaker, the Christian expert on the French painter Paul Gauguin, or capitalising on the success of plays he had written as a student. He chose the unpredictable path of the latter, working with his lifelong friend Paul Burbridge at the Riding Lights theatre, in York. His film and television work includes The Dream, starring Jeremy Irons, and The Miracle Maker.
Despite his own success in a precarious industry, in his forties Mr Watts became aware that many of his fellow theatre-makers and artists were suffering. “I felt the love of God in my projects, but I could hear a voice saying: ‘I love your projects, but what about my people?’” he recalls. “It’s very difficult for people with settled lives and incomes to understand how hair-raising the life of an artist can be.”
Founding the Wayfarer Trust to support practitioners in the arts and media, in the late 1990s, Mr Watts bought Freswick Castle, near John o’ Groats, to offer a place of sanctuary, hospitality, and spirituality for artists. “I had this idea of a haven, a home from home, for artists, and had visited the north of Scotland with my parents. I saw a picture of Freswick Castle in Country Life — it needed everything doing to it — and did the deal from the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.”
The castle has been restored, and Mr Watts lives in a cottage in the grounds, writing in a shed. He sees shared hospitality and breaking of bread together as key to Christian mission. “Sometimes, I think you are more likely to meet God in a glass of whisky by the fire, or a walk on the beach, as in a pew,” he says.
Attending Canisbay Church, where the late Queen Mother worshipped and now the King does when at the Castle of Mey, Mr Watts has recently inherited the late organist’s 14-year-old chihuahua, Poppy. Last summer, Poppy was photographed being stroked by the King. Mr Watts reads the lesson, and has occasionally preached, but has to balance church life with his Wayfarer Trust and writing commitments: “I’m not very good at saying no, that’s why I’ve got 18 godchildren.”