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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Excellent Plays

Excellent Plays

Both these plays are extraordinarily interesting as vivid studies of historical personages, as modern works that tackle religious problems common to a past age and to our own, and simply as plays. The last thing one would have expected from Mr Osborne would be a play about Martin Luther, the Augustinian monk whose convulsive energy created a new form of Christianity, dependent on the Book, not the Church. The temptation for Mr Osborne must have been either to take sides in the complex Catholic-Protestant controversy (thus producing a dramatic vilification or justification of Luther) or else to rely cheaply on the findings of modern psychiatry in presenting, for example, Luther’s decision to abandon his vow of celibacy, or his frequent use in his writings of excremental imagery. Mr Osborne does not take sides. He shows Luther as he may well have been, a man of tormented but real integrity, a peasant visionary; he also shows Cajetan, the Cardinal who tried to reconcile Luther to the Church, as a man of real tolerance and understanding. But the smell of latrines is perhaps too strongpage 519 in the play. Luther’s bowels dominate it at least as much as his theology. The language is extremely colourful and direct. It should stage well.

Jean Anouilh’s study of Thomas A’Becket has a diamond clarity. The dramatic development of the breach between Thomas and King Henry II is perfectly handled. M. Anouilh has the edge on T.S. Eliot. Becket is a better play than Murder in the Cathedral, because no one preaches in it, and the characters have full personal substance. It is a broader play than Luther, because of its theme – the clash of the authority of Church and State, a more objective issue than the clash between Luther and Papal authority. In this fine translation M. Anouilh’s language rings like a struck wineglass. The play should stage magnificently.

1962 (270)