No, not Dan Brown nor even Agatha Christie, not the great unsolved, nor medieval mystery plays. Here it means there’s more to this than meets the eye; and given the gospels are primary expressions of a mystery then they themselves are mysteries. (It’s not what we expected!) The four gospels we say are mythic stories about the origin and identity of very early Christian minorities: about Jesus becoming us – the fusion of groups of Christians and the risen Jesus in one body, so the body of Christ isn’t a ‘he’, it’s a ‘he/we’. This involves the creation of a new community, a new body. ‘He/we’ is a particular take on how to view the four gospels together: it’s a mystery.

The import of having 4 gospels is that, quite simply, something was untold: it wasn’t there already. A decision was made not to have one telling, attractive and compelling as that must have been; and if ‘he/we’ is a particular take on how to view the four gospels together, it became clearer that all four are necessary for an understanding of this. In our understanding each account opens up another dimension of the gospel so that instead of a one-dimensional take on it, we have a multi-dimensional take. The questions for the project were: ‘How are they distinct?’ And, ‘how do they resonate together to illuminate this gospel?’ We discovered there’s a richer understanding of it when they dovetail and that a fourfold take on the gospel is productive for performance. Conversely, the quest – or the manhunt – for the historical Jesus aims at developing a single unifying account and in doing so it’s pulling away from the mythic which involves four accounts of one gospel.

If we say the gospels are ‘accounts’ of the life of Jesus, which is presumed to be one – and only one – untold story waiting to be told, then the gospel accounts should harmonise, only they don’t. Consequently we often go back to the source, Jesus, who is then subjected to our relentless individualizing, personalizing and customizing. However, if we say the gospels are not simply accounts of Jesus, but foundational stories about our identity, how we came to be, then diversity is already there in Jesus (it’s why someone can say ‘Jesus is black’.) Just as the Christian God is not one, so Jesus is not one, and the gospels are not one story.

Indeed, why bother? It’s the question at the heart of many comments on the work of the project: ‘Aren’t some texts simply not meant to be performed?’ Perhaps, but in our experience performance of the gospels opens up different ways of responding, revealing just how limited is our range of response. One of the advantages of performance is that it’s not weighed down by the written word and invites us to step away from our wordiness, involving music, movement, design – all the resources of theatre – so as to enter the world that scripture imagines. To enable this to happen it insists on theatrical questions being at the heart of the project and that they will really help us engage with the gospels in unexpected ways. Theological or biblical questions gather round them. Critically, performance will allow us to see that, despite the doubts, each gospel is different. So the trick in such a project is to ensure that it’s always driven by performance.

It took us a little time to understand this and it only really began to develop after we realised that naturalism doesn’t work with the gospels. Our take on the gospels is that they’re mythic, but in unexpected ways. We’ve come to understand that the four gospels are mythic stories about the origin and identity of very early Christian minorities: about Jesus becoming us – the fusion of groups of Christians and the risen Jesus in one body, so the body of Christ isn’t a ‘he’, it’s a ‘he/we’. This involves the creation of a new community, a new body. ‘He/we’ is a particular take on how to view the four gospels together. It’s a re-creation, a transformation. The whole point of the gospel is a newly created symbiosis of he and we. We are he. Whatever happens to him happens to us – there’s no dividing line – which is why they can’t be read as news stories. We say they have a mythic cast, or mythic dimension, and speak of a mythic ecology. Initially we were reluctant to use the word myth because of the more recent notion that myth means make-believe and falsehood and a deeply ingrained instinct to assume all manner of things about what myth is. Of course there are essential ingredients to any account of myth and the gospels share in this, but if we say the gospels are myths then we immediately assume one thing and ‘universalise’ it, as it were, based on our understanding of the very literary Greek myths. Our preference for them suggests we prefer our myths to be highly crafted, but the gospels are jerry-built from odds and ends. It’s simply to say that they’re a different style of myth-making. Perhaps the closest thing to them is the storytelling of indigenous peoples e.g. native American ways of telling a story. Often done in a no-nonsense style – they don’t set out to impress – they have a disarming quality, a frankness, a lightness of touch . They’re not necessarily humorous though they’re moving that way, whereas many of us like to think of myth as ‘mammoth and monumental’, or at least intense. In our sense of it, myths are quite specific: not only are the gospels different from other myths, but the mythic worlds of Mark and John differ from one another while Matthew and Luke are different again. Many of us struggle to see this, so the point of performance is to show it – to show say, in the John, how we get from the ‘once and always’ vision at the beginning to the risen body of Christ at the end. John focuses on this ‘once and always’ union which believers/performers are now part of as the risen, transformed body. (Jesus is transformed – transformation is the key to performing John). However, whatever about the differences between gospels , all four of them feed into the central myth of ‘he/we’. In the end our sense is that myth takes you into a more interesting story because it’s our story.

‘He/we’ is a particular take on how to view the four gospels together. It’s a mystery. This is a key to the project. The ‘he/we’ principle is that there is no separation of God and people and Jesus is a living God astride both worlds . It’s a body made up of cells, not individuals, and it invites participation because we’re drawn into making it, remembering that if it’s all in the mind then there’s no place for the body. So ‘body’ is a source of meaning not simply a re-statement of the already known. In this sense it’s a generative image – stronger than community – and it’s not simply a metaphor. (Often it’s spoken about as if it were, but where it is, it strikes us as having the effect of gutting the body. What we’re left with then is a gutless wonder!) Furthermore it’s a protean concept – it’s not simple – and takes on different shapes because it’s shaped by different histories. If it’s true that in performance you have to simplify in order to focus on the body, then that’s what you do in order to make real the body. We’ve been clear all along that this simplifying can’t be done on a whim.

We have to re-focus in terms of this projection of the body. Jesus is not an isolated heroic figure, so that in fighting the demons say, in Mark, he and his followers work together to counter them. We work at collective story-telling – through music, movement, language – always bearing in mind that the creation of this ‘he/we’ is what these stories are about. Jesus as a community means the development of a communal voice; and, to re-iterate, ‘if it’s true that you have to simplify in order to focus on the body, then that’s what you do in order to make real the body.’  The aim is something like this: ‘… rich in detail, simple in telling’, true to the heart of the story.

We sometimes like to think of him in this way: the isolated hero. In the 2011 Port Talbot Passion Michael Sheen played him – or the Jesus figure of the ‘Teacher’ – as ‘a softly spoken loner with no memory.’ This means you lose the mythic dimension – the ‘he/we’ transformation – and without it the problem can be that the rest doesn’t matter. It may well be banal. Again, as one writer commented of Jesus in John’s gospel: ‘He’s an isolated, belligerent, self-absorbed figure … akin to the Greek tragedians dark vision of the hero.’ For us Jesus isn’t a hero in John – it’s not that kind of story – and we determined early on in both Mark and John, that we’d have to avoid this because Jesus as hero tends to isolate him, whereas the body that’s being formed throughout each gospel doesn’t make much sense if Jesus is separated out from us. We can handle Jesus, but not this re-created body. Indeed, if you say Jesus is made of all these other people and you’re part of this body, it has a certain tune-out factor. So we individualise him to ensure he’s just one person. Then we can idealise him, or make anything we want of him – a rebel, a hippy, a nice guy, a super hero. In response to which, it’s worth bearing in mind the statement that ‘Jesus isn’t your personal saviour’. Theatrically it plays out in this way: Jesus as individual problem for the actor v. Jesus as part of the performance script.

Jesus is a stranger figure than we care to imagine. A living God astride both the spirit world and human world, at moments he can be quite frightening. Everything he does is paradoxical and unsettling, everything he says is that. Riddles, paradoxes, the unspeakable are all part of this, but he’s not strange in expected ways as was Willem Dafoe in the movie ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’. There he was psychotic rather than unpredictable, but whatever else we might say about Jesus he ‘ain’t no weirdo’. If he is a hero then he’s an unlikely, unusual hero – one ‘… whose face I would not recognise in a crowd’; who is, ‘direct and distant as lightning’. But, as we suggested previously, even the central figure is not simply an individual. The whole point of this project is that you can’t separate Jesus from us. In this way, as we seek to de-familiarise and re-imagine him, the figure of Jesus is displaced. His is not just the face of an individual. The one is the many, the many are one: he becomes we and is transformed into multiple faces – Jesus is Ethiopian, Australian, Chinese et al. So we say myth is a way of imagining this unexpectedly strange Jesus and we emphasise that ‘you can’t strip away the mythic … and expose some original, pre-Christian Jesus.’ Early on someone suggested, ‘it might be better not to show us Jesus, rather, evoke him’ (as has happened in a couple of movies). For similar sorts of reasons there is the question we asked about what makes a scene interesting? In the light of which we suggested that the question might be asked of Jesus as to whether he should be in a scene. Our answer was, ‘yes, if it makes for the scene being more dramatically interesting.’ This may seem a little odd, but it marks it out as a theatrical project.

This was a question asked by a theatre company exploring the gospels in the context of the medieval Mystery Plays. They were all set to begin working: ‘Here we were, all ready to restore the painting, cleaning materials on hand, only to find that the canvas bears not one but at least four different overlaid versions of the picture’. Thinking to explore, or go with one gospel, they then wondered, ‘which one is the real one?’ Alas, it’s the wrong question. The artifice of the text is not representing what really happened – it can’t do that. It can’t be shown. Even if they were there on the spot they couldn’t tell it ‘as it is’. That’s why we say they’re mythic stories: the fact that we have four accounts of the one gospel is part of this and is what’s really interesting.

Passion plays will often give us what they think is already there, but the impact of having four gospels is that it’s not already there. Again, passion plays often like to show us what it was really like. The uniforms worn by the Roman soldiers and the mid-eastern dress are signs of this historical touch. The besetting problem was once stated at the beginning of a local passion play when a wonderfully outfitted Roman soldier invited us to ‘come on a journey where nothing is left to the imagination.’ As a reaction to that you get the ‘let’s-do-something-with-it’ approach which inevitably means deciding on a local and/or historical setting and going from there. It’s understandable, but more often than not simply emphasises some of the problems with passion plays. Medieval mystery plays often proceed in similar sorts of ways to this. Nobody wants to do them as museum pieces so we set them somewhere closer to home, let the local voice be heard, often in comic ways, and do our best with God and other elements of the mythic landscape. They’re often moving and entertaining – as with some passion plays and stations of the cross – but limited in their responses to the gospels by the medieval framework which tends to shrink down the bits of one story. One man shows are entertaining, moving and/or tedious in various proportions and often rely entirely on the text as is – the King James Version in Alec McCowen’s performance of the Gospel of Mark, while David Rhoads did his own translation for his performance of Mark. Finally none of the theatrical forms we’ve spoken about give us four versions. The gospels do.

The movies more often than not give us versions of ‘what it was really like’ and Mel Gibson’s ‘The Passion of the Christ’ – like stations of the cross – sees deep meaning in physical details. The gospels see things quite differently. They’re light on the angst and the gore because they don’t see meaning in them, but they’re full of details that don’t find their way into the movies or various performances e.g. in Mark – the torn curtain after the crucifixion and, at the arrest of Jesus, the naked, fleeing young man. (It seems we can’t deal with him, but what’s he doing there? It’s a question which opens up the imagination.) In that sense you could say that there’s a whole tradition of performing the life of Jesus which is basically at odds with the gospels. A recent example of this is filmmaker Paul Verhoeven’s 2008 book on Jesus – a work of serious intent – which is said to ‘disrobe the mythical Jesus to reveal a man who has much in common with other great political leaders throughout history—human beings who believed that change was coming in their lifetimes. Gone is the Jesus of the miracles, gone the son of God, gone the weaver of arcane parables whose meanings are obscure.’ He’s said to be making a movie, based on the book, that one writer described in this way: ‘Verhoeven’s Jesus movie will cast the famous Nazarene as a shit-stirring prophet, stripping away all that miracle-working and returning from the dead stuff.’ It sounds like a familiar pitch, but you get the idea; clearly there’s no room here for four different gospel accounts. Nor is there in the 2014 ‘widely endorsed’ movie ‘Son of God’ which, unlike Verhoeven, sought the approval of diverse religious groups and ended up getting an audience and at least one critique like this: ‘Few things cause the story of Jesus to fall short of God’s glory like a factual cinematic portrayal acted out by pretty Caucasians with British accents and bed-head walking joyfully across barren landscapes to a dramatic symphony of flutes and strings.’

It’s an interesting theatrical question. Are there other ways of performing scripture than passion plays, stations of the cross, medieval mystery plays, one man shows etc. interesting as they might be? And any other ways which might respond to this observation about the gospels: ‘They seem to have ceased to have any psychic power. Hence the attitude that you’d only want to present a gospel on stage if you were – as actors say – “going to do something with it ” e.g. start in the middle, imply a feminist critique, rediscover the King James Version English and all the other cul-de-sacs with which I know you’re familiar.’ We’ve been looking for a symbolic style of performance – for patterns of movement and sound and a setting – and looked to other forms of theatre and to anyone who was doing something that might assist the process: to Dario Fo, Bread and Puppet Theatre, Kneehigh Theatre, Theatre du Soleil, Erik Ehn, Footsbarn Theatre, Welfare State International, Julie Taymor, Kabuki, Peking Opera, Bongsan dance drama, movies from China and Japan, various physical theatre groups and contemporary circus and dance groups. We realised it was pointless to imitate their way of doing things, but we took from them whatever was helpful and looked to discover story frameworks and develop performance scripts as a means of enabling performers to think mythically and begin to feel at ease in this symbolic style of performance.

As we discovered in performance, naturalism might do the job with the ‘story-of-Jesus’ approach or the ‘life-cum-news story’ approach to the gospels, but given what we’ve said about the mythic cast of the gospels – ‘he /we’ is a key – and that myth works at a symbolic level, it becomes clearer that naturalism, or realism – they’re used interchangeably in the theatre – won’t get us very far in performing the gospels. In the mythic world of Mark for instance, the tomb that Jesus is placed in isn’t simply a burial chamber owned by Joseph of Arimathea etc. but a womb out of which we’re re-born. It’s a mythic space which confronts us with the totally unfamiliar, the uncanny. Therefore the setting, the scene, has to be strange so that, like the women fleeing the tomb, we are disoriented by it. Try doing it naturalistically, realistically, and it could end up simply spooky and/or very flat. But, of course, this is the dominant genre in Western theatre and the movies: ‘Remember that actors from the West will automatically apply the rules of realism to a text unless you guide them in a different direction.’ It’s our default position – we’re keen to make it sound like yesterday’s news. However, we agree with the follow up to that: ‘Actors are more than capable of working with many genres – as long as you are clear about the rules of engagement from the start.’ We soon realised we needed to become clearer about this. We were looking for a symbolic style of performance so we looked to other forms of theatre as suggested above. The director Katie Mitchell described something of the shift we were looking for in describing a shift in her own work: ‘The physiology of emotions replaced psychology as my key point of reference for talking about – and working on – acting.’ In fact we weren’t greatly interested in psychology as a way into these texts because it points you in a direction we’ve taken on occasions but that comes to a dead end. (Later, we would say, naturalism concentrates on the ‘he’ rather than the ‘he/we’.) To bring all of this into focus we worked at the development of performance scripts for the Mark and John. What they seek to do, as noted previously, is ‘to get a clearer sense of a new body in the process of being created. This raises all sorts of fascinating performance questions. Amongst other things it means you end up not following the order of the written account.’  Again, this means that we’ve had to re-focus in terms of this projection of the body, setting up resonances across the fourfold accounts of the one gospel: and as we did this we worked against Jesus being seen as an isolated, heroic figure so that in fighting the demons say, in Mark, he and his followers would work together to counter them. As well we worked at collective story-telling – through music, movement, language – always bearing in mind that the creation of this ‘he/we’ is what these stories are about.  (It’s why we say that myths are communal to the core and we are not part of the body as individuals, which means that Jesus is not simply individual based: ‘Jesus is not your personal saviour’). Still we found we had to continue to work at being clearer about it. We had to counter the naturalistic urge to ask questions like ‘what really happened?’ and realised we couldn’t stay too long in the naturalistic mode; which meant we needed to disturb the naturalistic dialogue and break free of the narrative voice. Finally, we usually favour the naturalistic because it seems the only way in which we can translate it into ‘our terms’; but we’re saying that to think of them as myths of origin and identity is a better way of creating an interesting story and discovering that it’s ours. In other words, of discovering it’s not way back when, but about our origins and our identity.

It’s a key to the four gospels, not just John with its symbolic narratives. After all, the mythic works at a symbolic level; that’s to say at a human level, because ‘the symbolic is the milieu in which the “real” happens for us.’ The symbol gives us contact with a living reality. It represents the real in a new way. And it’s not just an object, it’s an open ended action: ‘Symbolising activity is about weaving and re-weaving human relationships.’ So there’s no hidden meaning in a symbol waiting to be discovered, instead it is through ‘the exchange between persons that a symbol mediates meaning.’ It enables participation. Often we’re unsure about the mythic and symbolic as ways of being in the world – we want our meaning straight, not mediated – but it’s another reason why we decided to perform the gospels, and why we continue to explore different ways of performing them. It’s why we’re interested in symbolic patterns of movement, because it’s there the humanity of God is revealed – and this milieu creates a space, a breathing space, where it might happen. That’s what theatre hopes to do: ‘Create an environment in which a story can live.’ Truly free, alternate spaces.

We began with translations of both the Mark and John by the project’s translator/writer. These were based in oral storytelling – as are the gospels – and a desire to replicate the quite different tone of each one. We tweaked them along the way doing quasi-performance versions of them and then decided not to use the translations at all. Be bold we said, as Christopher Logue was in approaching Homer. We don’t need text in translation with a few words changed here and there; and we became aware the more references to the text you retain the more you may lose the interest of ‘outsiders’ ie. the public. In fact we decided we don’t need a lot of words and in certain key scenes e.g. the crucifixion in Mark, we don’t use words at all: but when we used them they needed to be interesting. An abiding question then was what’s interesting to hear? So we wanted to use all the resources of language – song, exorcisms, different languages, different registers within the low register of the gospel. The play of language in performance became dramatically critical – it’s a dramatic driver in Mark – and insisted on a need for performers from different cultures. It’s not to add a little exotic flavour, or unfamiliar colour. Language is part of the action. And then there’s Jesus. How do we get beyond Jesus-speak? Everything he says has to be paradoxical and unsettling: everything he does is that. Riddles, paradox, the unspeakable, are all part of this and in the Mark, Jesus’ voice is part of his weaponry: words as actions. Not forgetting of course there’s a need for actors to develop a ‘vocabulary’ with which to tell these stories.

Invariably this is one response to trying something a little different. Popularising is what we know when it comes to performing the gospels. If that’s our intent often the central question is what period do we set it in and then let’s ensure the language has a contemporary edge to it. It can call too much attention to itself, or end up being quite re-assuring because of its fixation on our own concerns, while simultaneously proposing that it’s dark and/or edgy.

It was suggested early on that it would be important to decide what sort of work we wanted to do. We understood what the difference was and the implications of one way or the other, but we weren’t too set on the choice, wondering whether it might not be both? As a theatre director with experience in this once said: ‘Community theatre is not opposed to virtuosity and excellence.’ Of course it can end up that way, but the performance scripts in development do require both virtuosity and excellence.

This was a question asked by an experienced theatre practitioner at the beginning of the project. We liked it. We’ve been clear that the ‘he/we’ mystery is at the heart of  the gospel stories, which means at every point we have to re-focus on the projection of this body. Or, as we have said previously: ‘He/we’ is a particular take on how to view the four gospels together: it’s a mystery. This is a key to the project.’ It means we’re involved – an audience is involved – in unexpected ways. This mythic sense of the body we become informs all our thinking. Jesus is transformed into a new body – the one becomes many, the many become one – and we see these transformations happening. It’s this which is at the heart of the project. We tell these four, quite different stories of creation, these mythic stories, in the hope they might take us to the heart of the matter.

It’s been said to us, whatever about the work of scholars, that ‘I don’t think of the gospels as stories.’ Many of us think this way and it’s understandable because of their episodic structure and various long sections of talking etc. This sort of mix is unique to the gospels, but it’s not what we’re used to in stories. 4 Mysteries Project suggests that each gospel can be understood as story and the development of story frameworks is a useful way of entering the gospels. It’s a reminder that we need to develop different ways of doing this, because, for many of us, the gospels can seem impenetrable.

‘I’ve been told that’, said one theatre director, ‘but I don’t believe it.’ Whatever happened to the greatest story ever told? And what about Jesus talking at length in John and in Matthew? What happens to the story? Even Pasolini in his 1964 movie ‘The Gospel According to St Matthew’ struggled to find one. Or take this description of a recent passion play done in a contemporary way: ‘It wasn’t a po-faced re-enactment of how the establishment has decreed the crucifixion should be shown.’ It was said to have used, ‘… a story everyone knows, as its template.’ Clearly we need to take seriously what people are telling us about the gospels. Our pitch has been, ‘here is a story, but it’s not one you’re familiar with.’ The subtext being no, we’re not trying to ‘convert’ you; first and foremost we want you to be caught up in this story, be excited by it, even gripped by it. Otherwise you can get this: ‘I never want to see Jesus again. Not in a movie, at least. Not after sitting through two hours and 18 minutes of “Son of God”, the latest tragedy about the life of Jesus …’

Are they? We have explored this a bit because the impulse for the project came from the sense that we already have these particular, distinctive stories and all we needed to do was tell them, helped along by our own translations based in oral storytelling. But in performance it doesn’t happen quite so simply as we had imagined. Their distinctiveness isn’t always apparent to performers. So the project had to move on from this starting point – you’re on a pilgrimage suggested one performer – realising that you have to make distinctive stories of them.

A breakthrough came when we started to ask what kind of story can we make out of each account of the gospel? We tried to find a frame for each gospel account that would bring into focus its distinctive character: for example, a frame that works for the Mark gospel is taking it as a war story, a guerrilla struggle to liberate people from the grip of evil and you have to test that framework, to ensure that it’s not reductive but productive for our hold on the material and the gospel, bearing in mind you don’t have to include everything that’s in the account you know.

Does it speak for itself? This is one lesson we’ve learnt along the way of this project: it doesn’t (despite some one man shows and movies suggesting otherwise.) It confirms what we’ve observed on many occasions with actors, with students, with people in local communities – many of us don’t know what to do with these stories, so we sit silently, looking round for someone who might be expected to know a thing or two about them, or we ‘do something’ with them, or we run a mile from them. Then we can find this in the wider community: ‘It shouldn’t be underestimated how irrelevant and uninteresting the gospels are to many people and a great conduit for hostility.’

Try this exercise on the back of an envelope, given that in Hollywood it’s sometimes said if you can’t say what the movie’s about on the back of an envelope then forget it. One person wrote: ‘It reveals who Jesus is, who God is, who we are’ – only that’s not a story, it’s a statement, and no one is going to see it at the movies. Often it’s what we come up with, but we’re not alone. ‘You ain’t got a story yet’ is the mantra of one well known script doctor: you can have everything in place bar that.

Our pitch has usually begun like this: ‘Here is a story. It’s not a story you are familiar with.’ However the passion play comments elsewhere suggest that we’re all too familiar with the story. But are we? Consider the end of Mark’s gospel. How does it end? Three women come to the tomb, only the rock across the mouth of the cave has been rolled away, there’s no body and there’s an angel. So what’s the angel figure doing here? There should be a dead body – where is it? What sort of a place is this? Disorientation is the basis of what’s happening. The ending of the story text is up in the air, it doesn’t resolve things, which is its beauty and its strength. At the end there are two questions: What have we seen? And what have we been given? The tomb is a womb – not simply a burial chamber – but what’s been born here? As we say elsewhere, ‘he was destroyed so that we could become part of him’. Once you’ve understood this ‘he/we’ mythic dimension you’ve come to a new beginning. It’s a new story. It informs all our thinking.

It’s not just for those ‘in the know’, or those for whom these stories matter, though the hope is they might see them afresh. If it’s at all interesting it should interest a general audience and if it doesn’t, then it’s probably not worth the doing!

Collaborating is the name of the game, but quite what that means in the context of performing the gospels is to be discovered. The gospels insist in different ways that we have to get free of ‘this-is-what-you-watch.’ We’re involved. Everyone’s in it. ‘Everybody is in the story,’ said one of the performers in the Bread and Puppet Theatre tellings of the Christ story in the 1960s: ‘To me it was mythological and a great story – it’s the most powerful story. It has to do with that primitive level of theatre ….’  The audience participates in the making of a body. In the resurrection account the living Christians are proof of it. There’s no proper ending. So too, with any performance, the ending is us, the audience. It’s what was said to us early on: ‘You’re looking for a new form’ – and this means, amongst other things, re-imagining the role of the audience. No doubt this is connected to the discovery that, in performing these stories, the way space is configured will be transformed. At one point someone said to us there’s more going on in the audience than on stage and added, ‘it would be good to see the audience doing it.’ We understood what he was getting at but it’s not quite a Bread and Puppet Theatre performance from the 1970s when, as someone once commented, ‘it was as if the performers were on loan from the audience.’ Still we’re keen to explore the role of the audience in performance. We’re not sure what we’ll end up with and we’re not ideologically committed to any old style, or even a new style call for ‘audience participation’, though the contemporary forms of interactive theatre-making are often interesting.

When people say there’s already a story there it often means there’s no room for us. Yet we know we have to read ourselves into the story. In other words we have to make a story of it. The story of Jesus as a biography doesn’t give us entry into the gospels – it doesn’t invite us to play a part. Often it simply says, here’s the story of Jesus, to which the response is, ‘oh it’s that story, the one that excludes us.’ It’s part of the reason why, for a lot of people, ‘the gospels don’t mean anything and they’re not going to.’ The challenge then is how do we imagine Jesus Christ? How do we imagine the world that scripture creates? How do we enter it? This is where performance comes in.

A lot of us want to. Most of the world does conceive of demons as real and out to get us, but often we don’t. Instead we’re embarrassed by them, as if they were old baggage, old props we’d prefer to dispense with. But why not accept they are part of the landscape of these stories? – which doesn’t mean sensationalise them. As with explaining them away that’s simply another way of dismissing them. Demons represent the other dimension in a society which pushes that dimension to one side. What the devil thing does is dramatise it. So in Mark this dimension is brought to the surface and foregrounded – demons are part of its mythic ecology. (It’s not the case in John). Questions then gather round this recognition: How do demons sound? What do they look like? What do we make of Jesus ‘tossing out demons’? Isn’t that a bit violent? I mean, don’t we embrace our demons? How do you think with demons? Getting rid of demons is based on an unshakeable belief in our ability to strip away the mythic, which, like magic, is anything we find unbelievable or fake, and expose some original, pre-Christian Jesus, effectively driving a wedge between Jesus and Christians. In turn, this guts the gospel writings, because they’re based in a surprising symbiosis of Jesus and Christians. Consequently our attention is limited to some ‘life-as-lived’ story of Jesus, with the gospel writings as four possible versions of this bitty life, which has so many missing years.

This was a question asked by a movie producer out of Hollywood. His follow up question was, ‘why should I pay $15 to see this?’ These are the sort of questions that keep us honest and give us perspective.

No, it’s a theatrical project and theatre of course has it’s own work to do; but as one performer remarked, ‘the fear that the project is covert evangelism is hard to dispel in the minds of the wary.’ The same performer suggested, ‘you’re bringing light into the world, don’t be afraid of this.’ It was an unexpected reminder, but the point of performing them is to have people come away and realise that not for a moment were they trying to ‘convert’ us. I’m reminded of the comment from a performer with the Bread and Puppet theatre in the 1960s: ‘To me it was mythological and it was a great story. It’s the most powerful story….’ He then went on to say: ‘We took the Christian mythology and infused it with a living feeling.’ He was Jewish. However, not unlike those who are wary of the project, people in churches may be puzzled, or distinctly nonplussed at the thought you would want to perform them.

As one artist involved in the project said: ‘It shouldn’t be underestimated how irrelevant and uninteresting the gospels are to many people and a great conduit for hostility. The more I discuss my involvement in this project with people the more I get that puzzled look and the question “why on earth would you want to do that?” I say something along the lines of stark primeval images and something essential and mysterious, but no conversation follows. This has happened three or four times now. Clearly many people don’t care about these stories even if they are the core myths of our civilisation. They seem to have ceased to have any psychic power. Hence the attitude that you’d only want to present a gospel on stage if you were – as actors say – “going to do something with it” e.g. start in the middle, imply a feminist critique, rediscover the King James Version English and all the other cul-de-sacs with which I know you’re familiar.’