When contemporary writers tell a story about Jesus and his followers e.g. Howard Brenton’s Paul first performed at the National Theatre, in London in 2005 and more recently Colm Toibin in his 2011/2013 play and 2012 novella The Testament of Mary, they often take a naturalistic approach that emphasizes the humanity of Jesus in down-to-earth, individualising ways and thereby seek to ‘demythologise’ the Christian telling of the story. (In doing so they keep company with quite a few scholars involved in the quest – or the manhunt – for the historical Jesus.) This emphasis has been insisted on for quite a while now – in theatre and in the culture – and, in the modern way, assumes that any notion of myth is a form of propaganda, rather than wondering whether, at its best, it may be a particular way of imagining the world.
So, in Brenton’s Paul the original followers – Peter, James and Mary Magdalen – insist that Jesus didn’t die on a cross but was rescued and given shelter by them, later dying in Syria. There was no divinity about him – for them he was a man, indeed one who married a Mary Magdalen described by a critic as, ‘earthy, bitchy.’ They all conspire to keep Paul in the dark until Peter, now facing death, spills the beans to him. Does this stop Paul in his tracks? Not at all, because he has a track record as a ‘delusional fantasist’ and this isn’t going to divert him from the mission he’s on to keep alive the myth of Jesus crucified and risen from the dead. By all accounts there are some good things along the way including the performances of Paul and Peter and an underlying sense that the writer is invested in the outcome to the point where a critic described the play as ‘rivetting and richly ambivalent.’
In Toibin’s writing Jesus’ mother Mary is a loving, grieving mother and wife watched over by two followers of her son who are intent on writing up his life into The Greatest Story Ever Told. She’s no follower of his, having warned him about this group of misfits who gathered round him: ‘And she wants to be allowed, for once, to tell her story, on her terms …’ And so it goes: ‘simple and moving’ says a reviewer of the book, ‘stark and strong’ says another of the play – and no doubt there is that – along with the inevitable response to this way of telling a story of Mary: ‘rescuing Mary from mummified devotion’ and, ‘giving her back a humanity the Church has robbed us of’. It’s instructive that this binary opposition of the devotional and the human is spoken of by almost all the reviewers of the play and the book that I’ve read. To a man and a woman they’re agreed on a particular way of imagining the possibilities. On the one hand we get this: ‘she is angry, sharp witted and dares to speak a dangerous truth.’ As opposed to: ‘the meek, obedient woman of scripture, painting and sculpture.’ And so it goes: what the same publicity for a 2017 production described as, ‘rethinking a woman who has been turned into an icon.’ Maybe we’re unable to entertain any re-imagining of woman and icon – an iconic woman perhaps – which is what you might discover in the tradition when you take a considered look (as well as a fair bit of kitsch).
Yet, curiously enough, it seems there was a gesture towards this sort of imagining in Fiona Shaw’s performance of The Testament of Mary as directed by Deborah Warner, which, according to one critic made use of ‘quite a few visual aids’, subsequently referred to as ‘symbolic clutter’. One response to this was that, ‘by the time we get to Calvary, you have a good idea of how she is going to use that long wooden ladder and those coils of barbed wire.’ Indeed, ‘long before the moment of confrontational nudity, you will have probably surmised that Ms. Warner was going to err on the side of literal mindedness.’ Less might have been more he proposed and better suited to the ‘simple, moving’ text; but, intriguingly, even Toibin’s text called forth a less straightforward response from Shaw and Warner. According to some critics, the problem was they ended up with a performance, that while it deconstructed the icon of a Pre-Raphaelite Madonna – presented to begin with as a stand in for all that ‘mummified devotion’ – in its stead it gave us a post-devotional icon as a stand in for all our own suitably iconoclastic notions. The one had displaced the other: ‘she has divested the stage of one landscape of smothering iconography only to substitute another.’
It’s a version of the need, often felt by performers, ‘to do something with’ the gospels. The answer to our nagging question, ‘what really happened?’, is informed by all manner of historical material which aims to provide a context of sorts and make things more interesting. In part this is a response to the perception that the gospel is all surface – it seems there’s nothing much to it – as actors, students and people in local communities often attest. So too does Tobin when he points out in a program note that Mary doesn’t say much in the gospels. The reason for this is not necessarily what first comes to mind; it’s that myth, preferring to leave things open, doesn’t specify. (Tobin suggests it’s this openness which allows believers to ‘impose their needs on her’.) To take two other instances: the gospel isn’t interested in what Jesus looked like, and if Mary doesn’t say much, her husband Joseph says not a word. Why? Because myth leaves things open in order to invite our responses – including those of Toibin and Brenton.
What we end up with, as we suggest elsewhere on the website, is the practice of quite a few contemporary writers who decide to make Jesus strange by making him – and her in Toibin’s case – seem so familiar as to be unfamiliar. Again, there’s a long history of this sort of approach in novels, radio plays, musicals and movies and clearly there’s an audience for it. To the point where, over the last fifty years this mode of storytelling has become the agreed way of doing it ‘differently’. It often makes use of a little romance from the apocryphal gospels – Jesus and Mary Magdalen getting together – gives us an isolated central figure and attempts to show that it was all a beat-up, whether on the part of Paul of Tarsus, the great con man according to Brenton, or some other followers according to Toibin. Despite it being the done thing, because of Mary’s ‘compelling, bittersweet voice’ in the Toibin telling, we continue to think it remarkable, ‘how it grounds its familiar tales in the context of the everyday’. (These tales are always reckoned to be ‘familiar’.) Again, in the midst of this, we’re reluctant to allow any talk of divinity – though it’s been suggested that the Virgin Mary is, ‘all the more transcendent’ for being shown as ‘a mother traumatized by the loss of her son’, while not forgetting that her prayers are directed to chaste, unmotherly Artemis, the Greek goddess of fertility and the hunt. However, it seems the gospel dialogue of the human and divine is out of bounds, for fear we’ll end up denying a hard won humanity that secures our individualities. As a result we get one critic saying, ‘Toibin appears to be suggesting that Christianity would be better off if it abandoned the dubious idea of Jesus’ divinity’, something with which Brenton is in strong agreement. It’s a reminder of how one dimensional we can get when we put our minds to it. Not only do we have one version of the Jesus story where the gospels give us four, but we’re also unable to imagine a multidimensional telling of a story.
The Irish philosopher Richard Kearney has long been alert to the need to keep myth and history in dialogue while recognizing the need to distinguish between myth as an ‘open-ended process which frees us from the strait-jacket of a fixed identity and myth as a closed product which draws a magic circle around another kind of conformism, another kind of death’. To avoid this he suggests we need, ‘to keep our mythological images in dialogue with history’, so that myth – open ended, alive – can help free us from too diminished, too fixed an identity. As Kearney once expressed it: ‘without mythology our hopes and memories are homeless; we capitulate to the blind conformism of fact’
Implicit in a dialogue of myth and history is an ongoing dialogue of the human and divine, the invisible and visible, the heavens and the earth. The gospels hold this in tension, in something like the way that Julie Taymor is said to have maintained the balance between face and mask, the actor and the puppet in her production of The Lion King. In a 1998 interview, Richard Schechner noted that, ‘the tension in The Lion King, for me, was in the danger that the performance might fail, that the dialectic wouldn’t hold’. He later said: ‘you see the puppet and the puppeteer together – God is visible’. To which Taymor replied: ‘I’ve been calling that the double event.’ In lieu of something like this we can end up with a Mary examining ‘how myths are made.’ It might be more interesting, perhaps, if we were able to re-imagine a dialogue of myth and history.
4 Mysteries Project sees the gospels as four mysteries, indeed as four ‘myths’ – though mythic in unexpected, open-ended ways – and suggests that this is a helpful way of entering the gospels and imagining them. However, like the gospels, 4 Mysteries also insists that you need to keep alive a dialogue of history and myth. Jesus did die, but he didn’t say dead. How do we speak of this? We say the gospels are shot through with mythic elements, indeed that the mythic moments are the exhilarating ones, to the point where we call them myths so as to characterise their particular way of telling a story – their way of imagining the ‘Imagining’. However, if we insist on the gospels simply being historical accounts, by which we mean based in fact, then we may well end up adhering to ‘the blind conformism of fact.’ 4 Mysteries recognizes fact is stranger than that – ‘it is fact that requires explanation’ – just as it recognises myth is stranger than we care to think. In myth, as this project imagines it, the world isn’t obvious – it’s not ‘a closed product’ – whereas we often like to think the world is obvious enough, especially in what we might call the ‘real world’; but at its best, myth keeps saying things ain’t what they seem. How is it possible – the experience that’s at the heart of the gospel, of one becoming many and many becoming one? It’s this event, of which the Christian scriptures are the record, that Brenton, Toibin, et al, take to be a ‘myth’, in the sense of not being founded in fact and therefore unfounded. Alas, it’s based on a superficial reading of myth and our uncertainty in recognizing that a dialogue of myth and history is the gospels’ way of imagining how it is that Jesus died and didn’t stay dead – that his life didn’t end in death, in fact it ends with us. As is suggested elsewhere on the site: ‘Myth is a more interesting story because it’s our story.’