August 7, 2007
I was raised Irish Catholic on a diet of more film and stage versions of the life of Jesus than you could shake a bishop's crozier at. Mostly they tried for spiritual glories and just ended up with windy pomposity; they tried for humour by taking awkwardly spoken lines from some elderly translation of the gospels and tacking on inappropriate laughter. They either tried for Jesus as ass-kicking revolutionary and ended up with a mixture of Ben Hur and Conan the Barbarian, or plumped for Jesus as gentle pacifist and ended up with someone so pale and wan you were surprised He had the energy to get out of bed, never mind start a world religion. They should all have seen Creation Theatre's The Oxford Passion, a production of the central story of a religion which has nothing preachy, stuffy or po-faced about it, and instead hits you in the chest and the hindbrain with the force of myth. (And I'm not talking the silly modern usage of 'myth' to mean fallacy here.)
Tom Peters, previously seen as a sort of English Messiah in the lead role of Creation's Robin Hood, plays Jesus with mesmerising charisma, pulling off that mixture of righteous anger, painfully palpable compassion and human warmth that was missing from all those films of my childhood. He is haunted by Dami Olukoya's Angel of Death, with a spiky otherworldly grace and a richly emotive singing voice. Focusing on four of the twelve disciples was a good call. They were all well-drawn, but I particularly enjoyed Jonathan Baker's Thomas, suspicious of his own deep-seated need to believe. Both Marys – mother (Caroline Devlin) and Magdalene (Natalie Garrett) – were also great; passionate women rebelling against the onward march of destiny.
Lizzie Hopley's script is based on a brand-new translation of the New Testament. The language is contemporary, but never cringily so, and the message of non-retaliation and forgiveness as a stop to the cycle of violence comes across as though new-minted. But this is not a dry, worthy moral lesson. It is an evening of theatre at once heart-wrenching, boisterous and uplifting; a play about God which gets you thinking about what it means to be human.
Tom Peters, previously seen as a sort of English Messiah in the lead role of Creation's Robin Hood, plays Jesus with mesmerising charisma, pulling off that mixture of righteous anger, painfully palpable compassion and human warmth that was missing from all those films of my childhood. He is haunted by Dami Olukoya's Angel of Death, with a spiky otherworldly grace and a richly emotive singing voice. Focusing on four of the twelve disciples was a good call. They were all well-drawn, but I particularly enjoyed Jonathan Baker's Thomas, suspicious of his own deep-seated need to believe. Both Marys – mother (Caroline Devlin) and Magdalene (Natalie Garrett) – were also great; passionate women rebelling against the onward march of destiny.
Lizzie Hopley's script is based on a brand-new translation of the New Testament. The language is contemporary, but never cringily so, and the message of non-retaliation and forgiveness as a stop to the cycle of violence comes across as though new-minted. But this is not a dry, worthy moral lesson. It is an evening of theatre at once heart-wrenching, boisterous and uplifting; a play about God which gets you thinking about what it means to be human.