‘Christianity and the Theatre’. Summary of a lecture given by Dr Philip Crispin (Lecturer in Drama, University of Hull) to the Hull & District Theological Society, Wednesday 19 January 2011.
Summary by David Bagchi
Christianity is intrinsically dramatic. The opening verses of Genesis and of St John’s Gospel (‘In the beginning …’) cannot be read aloud except dramatically. The Eucharist, and the Last Supper on which it is based, are performed before a congregation-cum-audience. Both religion and the theatre are concerned with the fundamental question of what it is to be human. More specifically, Christianity is a religion of incarnation, and my particular interest is in drama in which the transcendent and the earthly jostle each other cheek-by-jowl.
Medieval drama
The mystery play cycles exemplify this collision of sacred and profane, as ‘mystery’ refers both to the mystery of faith and to the secrets of the trade guilds which produced the plays. This ambivalence extends even to the surviving texts (many of the plays were lost due to the Reformation). For instance, in the so-called Wakefield Second Shepherd’s Play, the anti-hero Mak steals a sheep and disguises it as the Christ-child. Is this blasphemous, or is it not rather a profound reflection on what Yeats called ‘the bestial flaw’ in humanity, the combination of sacred and profane which makes up each one of us?
Notable features from other mystery plays include: the direct, emotive appeal of Christ on the cross to the audience in the Crucifixion (York Cycle) – ‘All men that walk by way or street / … Behold mine head, mine hands, and my feet’; the way in which natural light and darkness could be used to enhance a performance (e.g. The Harrowing of Hell would have been performed in fading light); and the way in which stagecraft could be employed, such as the use of a trapeze to enable angels to flit to and fro in The Last Judgement.
This theatrical manipulation of an audience’s emotional response to religious themes had a dark side as well, of course. The Play of the Sacrament from Croxton, East Anglia, portrays a group of Jews who steal a Host in order to torture it in a second crucifixion. When they place it in an oven, the oven explodes (the stage direction indicates the use of special effects) and a bleeding Christ appears amidst the wreckage. The play ends with the Jews’ being so astonished by this miracle that they convert at once. Antisemitism was a feature of the mystery plays, but in this case the true target of the play was more likely the denial, by Lollards, of the physical presence of Christ in the eucharist than actual Jews – who would not be re-admitted to England until the seventeenth century.
Alongside the mystery plays were morality plays such as Mankind [which Philip directed in a new production at Hull in 2010]. In this the audience witnesses a carnivalesque pyschomachia, or battle of good and evil for the soul, but in the process finds itself sympathizing with evil in this sophisticated drama.
The Reformation
One thinks of the Reformation as ushering in a period of kill-joy censorship of the stage, especially of the theatrical portrayal of religious subjects. (One is reminded of Sir Toby Belch’s mocking question to the puritan Malvolio in Twelfth Night, ‘Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?’) But the true picture is more complex than that. For instance, Marlowe’s Dr Faustus can be interpreted in purely Protestant terms (the mockery of the pope and of friars; the allusion to the existential despair engendered by the Calvinist doctrine of predestination). But it also contains a traditional, Catholic, psychomachia between good and bad angels. Shakespeare himself is often presented as a playwright with little interest in religion, but in fact his plays are steeped in biblical and theological allusions. For instance, Hamlet’s famous question, ‘What a piece of work is a man?’, can be seen not only as invoking Psalm 8 but also the Renaissance debate over the dignity of man.
The modern era
Despite the decline of Christianity’s influence in the West following the Enlightenment, playwrights of the modern era have continued to draw heavily upon Christian themes. This is exemplified by the work of two of the most influential Irish playwrights of the twentieth century, Sean O’Casey and Samuel Beckett.
O’Casey (a Protestant by upbringing but also an Irish nationalist) uses his famous play Juno and the Paycock to explore an age-old theme, the impact of tragedy on people’s faith. For Mrs Tancred, the death of her son destroys her faith (‘O Blessed Virgin, where were you when me darlin’ son was riddled with bullets?’), while for the heroine Juno her own son’s death leaves her faith unshaken (‘What can God do agen the stupidity of men?’).
Religious themes are if anything even more pronounced in the work of Beckett, who like O’Casey was also born into a Church of Ireland family. Waiting for Godot is full of such allusions. The title itself suggests that the characters are searching for God, undergoing a dark night of the soul. Estragon and Vladimir refer to the thieves crucified either side of Christ, and the on-stage tree/cross reinforces this identification. Winnie, the buried heroine of Happy Days, represents a Job-like figure, while in Endgame the characters’ names echo the ironmongery of the crucifixion: Hamm = hammer; Clov = clou, French for nail, and so on. No wonder that Beckett once wrote, ‘In the beginning was the pun’.
