The Bible on the Boards

The Messiah by Patrick Barlow

West Yorkshire Playhouse, 1996

Dramatising the Scriptures has always been tricky. It’s a question of tone more than anything else. Where do you pitch it? Too solemn and you lose the mass market. Take too many liberties with the source text and you lay yourself open to charges of blasphemy. No matter how pure the intention or reverential the impulse, as soon as an actor stands up and proclaims himself to be Jesus, or Mary, or Joseph, or Lot’s Wife, someone somewhere is going to be disappointed or, worse, outraged.

Quem Quaeritis?

In classical times, of course, there had been no problem. Zeus could descend to an earthly stage on a mechanical cloud and expect to be greeted with a cheer of recognition because the ancients had created their gods in their own image. But once Christianity had taken hold in the West, that situation was exactly reversed in the minds of men and in the earliest religious dramas the roles of saints and angels were so sacred that they could only be taken by clerics.

The first liturgical dramas were based on the life, death and resurrection of Christ. At first the stories were simply sung by choirs at Easter and Christmas services, but as these Masses became more elaborate, so dialogue was added. By the late 10th century a Visitatio sepulchri ‘script’ was in regular use. Known as the ‘Quem quaeritis?’ (whom seek ye?), it was at first a single dramatised scene sung on Easter morning by one representing the angel at the tomb and a chorus of three representing the trio of Marys seeking the body of Christ. Then more scenes were added detailing other events leading up to the resurrection. In time these performances took on their own independent life, becoming so secular than in Germany, for instance, a comic character was added in the form of a merchant selling spices.

The Nativity play similarly rose out of the Christmas Mass, and by the 11th century a standard performance had developed based on a narrative sermon attributed to St Augustine. Parts were taken by priests, choirboys and, later, nuns, and the choir sang to or for the congregation rather than with it. It was, in other words, already a performance rather than a communal celebration, and obviously aimed at impressing a largely illiterate populace, “For,” as an anonymous commentator wrote in 1493, “often man is more stirred by sight than by hearing or reading” – especially since the whole thing was presented in contemporary garb with the kind of familiar props the audience used in their everyday lives.

Into the Community

It was only a matter of time before liturgical drama spread beyond the church doors, and when it did, it adopted several forms. One of these was the Mystery Play which presented the story of the Bible in cyclic form from Creation to Last Judgement, with separate town guilds each mounting a different scene on a perambulating float. In time individual scenes were mixed and matched according to local taste and custom: Germany, for instance, had a predilection for nightmarish devils and contemporary satire, France liked its spiritual lyricism to be laced with bawdry while in Britain, physically harrowing moments were relieved by scenes of comedy or farce. Many of these cycles still survive in such places as Chester, Coventry, Lincoln, Wakefield and York, and today the huge casts are still made up from members of the local community. Although performers were always traditionally amateur, in the Middle Ages some could expect payment in accordance with the importance of their role: in Coventry in the 15th century, we are told, God could expect to earn 3/4d while Souls (Saved or Damned) got 1/8d.

The Passion Play, dealing specifically with events from the Last Supper to the Crucifixion, became particularly popular in Europe after 1313, when the date of the Feast of Corpus Christi had finally been established. The Good Friday story proved to be one of the most popular festivals of the year, drawing in huge crowds. At first the church approved because the plays spread the good word to an appreciative populace and the business sector offered financial support as trade prospered. However, these shows became so spectacular that the Church eventually washed its hands of them and by the end of the 15th century they had mostly died out. The only one to survive into modern times is that of Oberammergau, which has been presented in Bavaria every ten years since 1634 – though even today the cast has to be given a special dispensation, or Ablass, to absolve them of the ‘sin’ of representing wickedness in a holy setting.

Another type of early vernacular stage show is the Morality Play. Now best known in the form of the Everyman series, these were not tied to any particular church service and so could be played at any time of the year. They incorporated in simplistic form representatives of good and evil in individual characters: Vice came to be one of the most popular, a charming, unscrupulous, humorous and seductive rogue who persisted through to Faust’s Mephistopheles and beyond.

God Goes West

The generic Mystery Play was finally suppressed in England after 1533 when the founding of the Protestant Church banned representations of Christ and other figures from the Bible as manifestations of Catholic superstition and idolatry, and it wasn’t until another four hundred years had passed that the next great source of religious entertainment packaged for the masses would appear. And when it did, its name was called Hollywood.

There is an adage in the film industry that states “You can’t make a good film from a good book,” so when the source material happens to be the Good Book itself, it would seem that the filmmakers were on a hiding to nothing from the start. Whilst sometimes they triumphed with some of the most spectacular scenes imaginable, in the process they also produced an endless amount of overblown and tasteless tat.

For every Quo Vadis?, MGM’s biggest money-spinner after Gone With the Wind, there is a Silver Chalice starring Paul Newman as the Greek sculptor Basil (yes, Basil), called in by Lorne (Bonanza) Greene to create a suitable receptacle to hold the cup Christ uses at the Last Supper. Similarly, for every King of Kings, whose excessive devotion to historical accuracy ensured that Jeffrey Hunter as Christ was required to shave his armpits for the crucifixion scene, there is a Ben-Hur, winner of eleven Oscars, whose chariot race is among the most thrilling action sequences ever filmed.

Ready When You Are, CB

The main man in the history of the biblical epic is, of course, Cecil B DeMille whose style evolved in the silent era and was to remain the same throughout his career. Among his stock ingredients were a strict adherence to authentic period detail, epic scope lent by vast crowd scenes, and sex. And, this being Hollywood, the greatest of these was sex. No one exploited it as brazenly or as successfully as DeMille, and his run-in with the censor over The Sign of the Cross (1932) illustrates the double standards by which he – though by no means he alone – operated.

At one point in this titillating travesty we see Claudette Colbert’s nearly naked Poppaea bathing in a bath of asses’ milk (actually powdered milk which by the end of two days’ filming had turned to cheese and stank to high heaven). The virginal heroine is then faced with a wildly erotic dance by a bevy of slave girls in an attempt to arouse her interest in a lustful lesbian. It was this second ‘attraction’ that drew the attention of the Hays Office, enabling DeMille to offer this all-purpose self-justification for his life’s work: “How are you going to resist the temptation if there isn’t any?” His films, he claimed, were always essentially about the triumph of virtue over wickedness, the spirit over the flesh – but he was always careful to make the point only after as much of that flesh as possible had been exposed in all its lewd, gyrating detail.

This could, to a point, explain why the religious epic was allowed greater licence in terms of sex and violence than other types of movie. The story – whether it was that of The Robe, Solomon and Sheba, Samson and Delilah, or David and Bathsheba – simply be being based on the Christian religion must be morally uplifting, QED. The thinking was pure sophistry, but it worked for everyone, and the cash registers rang like church bells on Sunday morning.

Inevitably for some, Martin Scorsese’s challenging cinematic offering The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) took temptation too far. The small sound-bites on radio, snippets on TV, the frame-by-frame photos in the press, all courted controversy and moral outrage, out of context and in your face. For those who managed to see the full picture it was a poignant scene of sacrifice; for those who didn’t, it was deemed thoroughly offensive.

From Large Screen to Small

The cinema’s younger rival television has traditionally approached the subject of God with a lot more circumspection, not least because it has never had the seemingly limitless resources of the big film studios. Occasionally a mammoth production like Lew Grade’s Jesus of Nazareth or Moses the Lawgiver will rival the old-style Hollywood epic with a suitable curb on the flesh and thuggery in deference to the worldwide family audience, but, in Britain at least, the whole subject has tended to coincide with evening Mass on Sundays, or placed in the safe and anodyne hands of the old-fashioned sitcom writers. In the sixties Our Man at St Mark’s starring Donald Sinden gave way to All Gass and Gaiters starring Derek Nimmo, Oh Brother! starring Derek Nimmo and Oh, Father! starring Derek Nimmo. More recently the trend for gentle comedy has reflected wider changes within the Church: Dawn French, as The Vicar of Dibley, has put women priests into the TV parish, Ballykissangel has emphasised the man beneath the dog collar, and Father Ted has helped us to laugh at his idiosyncracies.

While we may be able to laugh at the institution, and blasphemy can still be punished by legal redress, the Bible has remained sacrosanct. It therefore may not come as a surprise that John Birt stopped the broadcast of the new BBC Radio comedy Eammon: Brother of Jesus. But should we really presume that soulless satire could ever replace the true spirit of Christmas or Christianity? The Messiah, having been on both stage and TV, inspires more empathy than antagonism, as two inept characters try to reveal the whole Nativity epic in all its glory, and Dennis Potter’s more serious attempt to look at God on the small screen, Son of Man, shows Jesus as a man first, with passions and a job to do.

There is no doubt that the most widely read book in Western literature has provided some of the most enduring stories for stage and screen and, believers or not, audiences will continue to be enthralled, enlightened and, if not instantly converted, at least entertained by the adaptations. No bad thing in this wicked world, and if tonight we leave the theatre feeling only more at peace with ourselves and each other, then that is a sound first step. Once the journey out of ourselves has begun, who knows where it might lead?