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.’

If you were to ask the question of Shakespeare’s plays do they tell us about what really happened in England, or Venice, or Rome, or wherever they’re situated, you’d probably respond no, they’re not designed to do that.  As someone once said: ‘Shakespeare’s plays we’ve found are about us, not what really happened – we don’t go to them for that.’   It puts me in mind of something that’s spoken about elsewhere on the website about the four gospels and myth: ‘myth asks the question “what does it mean for us?”  Rather than only ever ask, “what really happened back then?”’  Perhaps that’s why we might speak of a mythic dimension in both the gospels and in Shakespeare’s plays – they’re about us!

Something of the way in which Shakespeare’s plays get to be about us is alluded to in Jonathan Bate’s book The Genius of Shakespeare.  Bate takes seriously the words from a W.H. Auden poem – which he quotes – about how poetry works its magic: ‘The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.’  He goes on to say: ‘What I mean by Shakespeare is not just a life that lasted from 1564 to 1616, but a body of words and stage images which live because they were originally Shakespeare’s modifications of the words and stage images of his predecessors and because they have subsequently been modified again and again in the guts of successive generations of the living.’  The phrase, ‘a body of words and stage images’ and talk of being modified in the guts is a striking way of getting at what’s going on here; there’s some sort of embodiment that’s happening – the words and stage images are modified and, to take it a step further, we’re modified in the process: transformation is at the heart of it. You saw this sort of gutsy modification, this body of words and stage images being re-created, variously and wonderfully, in the 2012 Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre ‘Globe to Globe’celebration of Shakespeare from round the world: 37 plays were performed by 37 different companies in 32 different languages. That’s a lot of modification in the guts of the living.

It’s this sort of modification in the guts that re-creates, in performance, the body of words and stage images that is the text and in doing so it may even create a temporary community which could be understood, metaphorically, as a body. Though perhaps any talk of a body being re-created – as in the liturgical drama of ancient Athens and the English Mystery Plays – is better put aside and we simply have to accept that what theatre might do in the 21^st century is offer us insights, or images for individual consumption. This is a little different from the 4 Mysteries sense of things, where ‘body is a source of meaning … a generative image … not simply a metaphor’, but, ironically, the project is based in a recognition that theatre may be able to show us what this body looks like.  And, as we say elsewhere about performing the gospels, it’s not that there’s an existing body which is simply modified, but that it’s re-created in performance.  It’s a reminder that perhaps the process of performing Shakespeare is even more dynamic than Bate suggests.

Talk of a body of words and stage images being modified in the guts of the living – and even of a body being re-created in the process – is a reminder that this process is rather like eating and that if you were to ask me how do we begin to re-create such a body and find ourselves in it, I would say by eating. That may seem a little strange, or too basic perhaps, but, as Peter Schumann the founder of The Bread and Puppet Theater once said: ‘for a long time theatre has been separated from the stomach.’ (Where this is the case we may say that it’s disembodied – quite literally gutless.)

In one way or another it seems theatre is a place of feeding and being fed – a feeding without food suggested one writer – where hunger is a pre-requisite and eating is the way in. David Cole in his 1992 book Acting as Reading spoke of eating as being at the root of theatre – a theatre he describes at one point as, ‘recovering the lost physical of reading as eating.’ (In great depth the book ‘seeks to map the relation between three activities: acting, which recovers eating as the “lost” physical of reading’.) I like to think that Schumann’s insistence on there being bread to eat at his performances – as a reminder he went on to say,  ‘of the sacrament of eating’- gets at something of what’s happening in Shakespeare. Somehow or other his plays allow for more ‘modification in the guts’ than many another writer, ensuring that where this sort of gutsy transformation occurs – of words, stage images and us – some sort of body is re-created and this is central to his work.  Indeed, according to Erik Ehn, it’s central to the work of the theatre: ‘theatre is about our being together and seeing how we can give of ourselves.’ Like myth and sacrament it’s communal to the core.

Elsewhere on the site we use the word myth to speak of this sort of re-creation. When we speak of the gospels as creation myths it’s a way of suggesting how we become part of him; a way of getting at how Jesus is transformed into us, resulting in the creation of what we call a ‘he/we’.  Myth is a way of describing the creation of this ‘he/we’, the body that is central to the 4 Mysteries Project. Clearly the body being spoken of here is a little different to Shakespeare’s transformed body of words and stage images, but, I like to think, for all the differences the process of transformation is analogous.

To explore this a little further: the talk of bodies, guts, eating, transformation – myth too – brings to mind the phrase ‘sacramental theatricality’, used by one writer to speak of Sarah Beckwith’s writing about the medieval Mystery plays and Shakespeare.  Again, I like to think something like this is alluded to in the words of Bate and Schumann and that such a phrase is another way of speaking of the re-creation of a body: another way of speaking of the mythic dimension in both Shakespeare and in Schumann’s work.  And I wonder whether this phrase with its roots in the Mystery plays, but re-appearing transformed – modified in the guts – in Shakespeare’s work, is better able to articulate this re-creation than say a Harold Bloom with his talk of a secular scripture and Shakespeare inventing us, or Ted Hughes proposing that Shakespeare had created a myth of his own, or Stephen Greenblatt suggesting we’re assigned the task of keeping alive the life stories of Shakespeare’s characters, interesting as each of them is.

Of course this sort of talk may run counter to our sense that Shakespeare is, thankfully, a no-go zone religiously. Whatever about the more recent work of scholars on sacramental poetics and performance in Shakespeare et al, a lot of us tend to agree that the word sacrament like the word religion is too confining and we’re grateful that the Elizabethan playwrights had to keep them off stage in order that we might think of Shakespeare as the opposite of what they seem to imply. Perhaps this is why we have Bloom’s book Shakespeare: The Invention of Us, and  why, when  we speak of Shakespeare and myth, it’s a way of suggesting his work might be seen as a living alternative – ‘a real myth of the culture himself’ -to those other myths of transformation enacted in sacrament and religion (let alone in theatre!)

However, as Peter Schumann reminds us, talk of sacrament and the sacramental is not just religious speak.  In the mid 20^th century the poet and artist David Jones broadened out the discussion a little by suggesting that, ‘the nature of man demands the sacramental. If he’s denied the deep and real, he’ll fall for the trivial, even the ersatz.’ While in 2007 the art critic Robert Nelson published a book entitled, The Spirit of Secular Art: A History of the Sacramental Roots of Contemporary Artistic Values.  Jones was a Catholic, Nelson is not a ‘believer’, but both are agreed that, like eating, this is human stuff we’re talking about.  It’s for this reason that, to take it a little further, another writer can speak of sacraments as, ‘the revelation of the humanity of God.’  Not so much an object as an action, indeed symbolizing actions, so that, ‘symbolising activity is about weaving and re-weaving human relationships’ and the symbolic becomes ‘the milieu in which the “real” happens for us’- which is what you get in the Mystery plays, and, modified in the guts of the living, in the plays of Shakespeare. At which point, across the body of his work, we may begin to speak of a mythic Shakespeare, but differently to so much other talk around Shakespeare and myth, because here the mythic emerges from and has its origins in a body of words and stage images modified in the guts of the living: it describes this process of transformation, this re-creation of a body, which embodied on a stage is the myth of Shakespeare at work; and it’s what the phrase ‘sacramental theatricality’ is getting at. It’s another way of speaking of this event. It becomes clearer I think that what lies at the heart of any sacramental vision of the world – transformation of us and the world – lies at the heart of Shakespeare’s work, as it does with myth. The 4 Mysteries Project is looking to find a theatrical language that enables us to speak of this.

Again, elsewhere on the website we say the mythic refers to the fact that Jesus’ life doesn’t end with his death, instead it ends with us – and the gospels tell of this happening, this re-creation of a body that is ongoing. So too, in Shakespeare’s plays, the mythic refers to the fact that his life doesn’t end with his death, but, differently and in interesting ways, it ends with us – and performances of the plays seek to tell of this re-creation of ‘a body of words and stage images’ happening ‘again and again in the guts of successive generations of the living.’ It’s why a Bread and Puppet performer once said of the stories of Jesus they performed each year, that, ‘ … everybody is in the stories.’  And why another writer concluded a review of Julie Taymor’s 2013 production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream in this way: ‘This is theater by everyone, for everyone.’ The modifying in the guts goes on, and where it does, we’re fed – but only if we have a stomach for it.

 

‘I think that the aesthetic and ethical end of art is ultimately charitable – art is meant to be politically, financially and spiritually free.’ Erik Ehn

Somewhere along the way of the project I picked up a second hand copy of The Saint Plays by Erik Ehn and as I read them I began to wonder what have we got here? From the Preface to the Song for the End the writing was both disorienting and fascinating, not quite what I was expecting.  Ehn described his work in the preface: ‘The Saint Plays are as broke, broken down and broken through as I can make them. The theology: Big Cheap Mysticism – here are little and poor vanishing acts.’ They are poetic, strange, elusive, alive, a small selection of his attempts to explore the lives of as many of Catholic saints as he can – ‘exploded biographies’ he calls them.Continue Reading

I don’t often write to movie directors but on one occasion I did write to the well known Australian director George Miller. My letter began: ‘I was watching your recent ABC interview and was intrigued by one of your responses as the interview drew to a close. You had interesting things to say about Ned Kelly and telling stories and when you were invited to suggest an untold story you responded, perhaps, that of Jesus. There was a pause before you added “been told.”’ Continue Reading