The Stage

Written on the Heart

Published Tuesday 8 November 2011 at 09:59 by Michael Coveney

Nobody ever said it was going to be easy. But David Edgar’s new play about the final literary and doctrinal arguments surrounding the publication of the King James Bible in 1611 comes as close as you could imagine to making the subject compelling.

O ye of little faith, repent your sins and listen up to the Blessed David, who twistingly and sinuously lays down several mighty themes: the struggle between Church and state, the definition of the Protestant liturgy in the shadow of the still persistent Catholic rituals, and, to personalise the story, the tortured progress of Lancelot Andrewes, the Jacobean divine and Bishop of Ely, who “chairs” the final wrangling in the light of his own guilty anxieties.

Andrewes, played with a stunning cerebral fortitude by Oliver Ford Davies, is possibly the driest and most enigmatic and impenetrable of all the RSC’s recent heroes. In a great act II scene, Edgar pitches him in debate with the ghost of William Tyndale (Stephen Boxer), the literary genius who had first produced an “undercover” translation of the Bible and was strangled and burnt in Belgium for his pains.

Edgar’s play confirms what Howard Brenton’s Anne Boleyn has suggested at the Globe these past two summers - that Tyndale was the de facto laureate of the Reformation and that all the other versions of the Bible are less beautiful and poetic than his, and that the King James version is predominantly Tyndale’s.

But Written on the Heart goes further, magnifying the scholarly disputes among the committee of academics and clergymen into a discussion of the nature of faith itself. This happens almost by stealth, so that we see various factions and positions clarified in the context of a living, if not always healthy, contemporary ecclesiology.

Gregory Doran’s superb production helps no end, making the obscure (Edgar’s intelligence as a writer, and his depth and range of knowledge on this subject, can leave lesser mortals panting in his wake) crystal clear in a bright and highly enjoyable staging.

Designer Francis O’Connor has placed a large, decorated wooden rood screen across the stage to divide the debating arena on the thrust from the inner sanctum of the altar at Ely. Scenes are punctuated with beautiful motets (music by Paul Englishby) and the incursion of a royal party led by the flippant Prince Henry (Sam Marks) is a splash of colour that visibly drains same from Andrewes’ face.

It is as though Doran is allowing the pull of the Catholic Church to challenge the inevitability of the Reformation, which of course it did, and still does. It is fascinating to see the gaggle of translators played by Bruce Alexander, James Hayes, Paul Chahidi and Jim Hooper jostling for position within this state of continual and dangerous flux.

The drama gathers towards Andrewes’ own personal mea culpas - there’s another marvellous scene with his younger self (played by Jamie Ballard) giving a dissident chaplain a good going over - and his professional ambition, beautifully resolved in a final scene where he dictates a decisive letter through the agency of Jodie McNee’s brightly articulate maidservant.

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