At a particular point in an interview about his 2013 solo performance of Mark’s gospel – *mark at La MaMa NYC  – George Drance SJ is asked a question about the humour in it. He agrees it is a little surprising to some but that there are humourous, ironic asides, or juxtapositions which make for moments of lightness, an example being the evil spirits leaving a possessed man and entering a herd of swine. Talking further about this Drance mentions that when directing a 5th century Sanskrit tale, Shakuntula and The Ring of Recognition, in 2010, he looked at a classical Indian text on theatrical practice which spoke of eight basic emotions being presented to an audience like a banquet – ‘there ought to be these different tastes’ – so that at the end of a theatrical evening they should have ‘a complete plate’. Drance suggests it’s how he likes to approach a text.

It got me wondering as to what it might mean for his solo performance of Mark (or indeed any performance of Mark). In this instance it seems to have meant an acting out of the ‘spirited dialogue’ between Jesus and his followers and those opposed to him,‘generating a modicum of suspense’, a ‘rich humor in some of it sharper passages’, a ‘freely adapted, mostly contemporary version’ of the gospel whose language might give it the immediacy of oral story-telling; plus music by Elizabeth Swados – both underscoring and sung – and a street art, underground framing of the story to give it an urgency evoking that of its first telling. I haven’t seen the show but this is what is spoken about in various interviews with Drance and a review in the magazine America. Were there other tastes to be had? No doubt, but my thinking about the show is shaped by these interviews and the review, and more broadly, other solo Mark performances that I’m familiar with, in particular those of Alec McCowen and David Rhoads.

There’s no question that hearing a gospel entire can have an effect. James Martin SJ tweeted that Drance’s performance was ‘moving, creative, exciting, challenging, profound.’ And Rob Weinert-Kendt in his America magazine review said: ‘It makes us hear these well-worn tales anew; it takes them off the inanimate page and gives them body and voice.’ That’s a start – it’s why you might want to perform them – but equally Weinert-Kendt alerts us to another effect that listening to an entire gospel can have: ‘While Mark’s brevity is clearly the key to the show’s manageable running time, the Gospel’s rough-hewn structure, lack of interpretative gloss and often prosaic language make it occasionally hard going. At its worst, it evokes Toynbee’s infamous characterization of history as “just one damn thing after another.”’ In brief he points to a potential problem with the one man show format. The so-called ‘well-worn tales’ can both come alive and, at moments, be a little dull.

Weinert-Kendt thinks the problem is this particular gospel so the solution he proposes is that Drance follow a time-honoured practice and introduce bits from other gospels to produce a more dramatic show. Drance’s solution was to provide as complete a plate as he could given his chosen mode of telling this particular story.

The 4 Mysteries Project website explores what a ‘complete plate’ performance of Mark’s gospel might look and sound like so there’s no need to go into too much detail here; except to say that the usual ways of responding to the gospels are very limited and that we need to discover different ways of opening them up.

Drance’s performance raises all sorts of questions that need to be asked if we’re to do this: questions about finding a frame for each gospel to enable its distinctive voice to be heard and a distinctive story to be told; about the language that allows this to happen; the narrator’s voice and its hold; how we might riff on the gospels rather than assume they’re set in concrete; about their humour; whether the gospels are best performed by one person; what part does music play in this; what of the demons that are so central to this gospel; and how useful is naturalism in telling this story? And so on.

One small observation I would make to suggest why it’s important to ask these sorts of questions. It’s not enough to have us wonder at the lightness of touch, the surprising hint of humour, when the demons leave the man living in a graveyard and enter a herd of pigs. No doubt there were other things an audience heard when Drance told the man’s story – it’s very moving – however one thing we need to be alive to is how strange is this place with its tombs. It’s yet another place where the spirits dwell.  This means we have to get away from the notion of an empty stage with its suggestion of ‘terra nullius’, because in this gospel these are spirited landscapes. Consequently we have to think differently – I would say learn to think ‘mythically’ – which, of course, has implications for performance.

Finally, I like to imagine that a ‘complete plate’ performance of Mark’s gospel might have a little more of the style and wonder that the New York Times suggested was a feature of George Drance’s direction of Shakuntula and the Ring of Recognition.