The play 'Paul' by Howard Brenton

A review by Don Horrocks.

03 October 2005

A new play, Paul, by Howard Brenton, has apparently already prompted 200 letters of complaint even before its first performance at the National Theatre at the beginning of October 2005. Mindful of the Jerry Springer: The Opera furore I therefore decided to view it at the first opportunity.

Howard Brenton has been a significant and provocative voice in British post-war political theatre. He has written or co-written more than 40 plays, perhaps the most memorable being The Romans In Britain (1980), which featured a scene of attempted rape that resulted in Mary Whitehouse mounting a private prosecution against the play’s director, Michael Bogdanov. The prosecution was eventually withdrawn.

After a career as a police constable, Brenton’s father sought to become a Methodist minister and lay preacher. Brenton’s response to his father’s piety appears to have resulted in determined atheism. Influenced by Sartrean existentialism, Brenton’s work has frequently been confrontational and satirical, making use of lampoons and caricatures together with black humour for subversive purposes.

He has now turned his attention to dramatising the life of St. Paul and what is the most famous conversion in history - when Saul became Paul on the road to Damascus. Describing it as ‘a play about the nature of faith’ and a ‘secular reading of the story of Christ’s resurrection’, the National Theatre’s director, Nicholas Hytner, admits it is ‘irreverent’, ‘provocative’ and ‘sceptical’, though ‘not intended to be controversial or shocking’.

The play is certainly not gratuitously offensive, unlike Jerry Springer, and does not contain anything that should provoke Christians, or indeed anyone else, to protest. It is quite well acted, contains several moments of humour, and presents no questionable scenes. However, the re-telling of the Paul and Jesus story, though imaginative and ingenious, is completely fanciful and far-fetched. It probably says more about the playwright’s own need to subvert what he plainly dislikes about historical orthodox Christianity than anything else. The play is surprisingly modern rather than post-modern in its look and feel. Whilst a degree of existential angst plainly pervades the play, it is something of an exaggeration to describe this as ‘an exploration of the nature of faith’ – rather it is a determined attempt to explain faith away and undermine its bases. Inevitably, it ends up as a hotchpotch of half-baked hypotheses endeavouring to prove a point. Secular and sceptical it certainly is – there is no room here for the miraculous and an existent God.

The approach is rather crude and well-worn, founded on an assumption that the first believers were necessarily deluded, and invites overtones of The Life of Brian, with snatches picked up from sceptical pseudo-academic New Testament critics. Brenton also cannot resist jumping on the Da Vinci Code bandwagon by having Jesus marry Mary Magdalene. The rather tortuous plot is based on the revelation of the risen Christ to Paul on the Damascus road actually being a trick. Not having died on the cross as traditionally supposed (picking up the Muslim tradition), it is the real Jesus who appears to Paul on the road. Instead, Jesus apparently was ‘purchased’ from the Romans by Joseph of Aramathea before he was dead and sheltered in private by Jesus’ brother James and by the apostle Peter. Portrayed as a rambling and half-mad, self-styled prophet, Jesus unfortunately ‘escapes’ his minders whilst James and Peter are journeying with Jesus to Damascus at the same time as Paul. Paul’s unplanned nighttime encounter with Jesus coincides with an epileptic fit suffered by Paul (his ‘thorn in the flesh’) that implacably convinces Paul that Jesus has risen from the dead. Despite being horrified that the story of the ‘resurrection’ is getting out of hand, James and Peter, who know the ‘truth’, prefer to keep Paul in the dark because, although he is mistakenly preaching that Christ rose again, at least it keeps him from revealing where Jesus really is, and Paul’s dissemination of the Christian message is very ‘useful’ for bringing in cash! This is the ‘real’ reason for the well-known controversy between Paul and the Jewish church! So it appears that the church is born out of the need to maintain a lie created by the disciples of Jesus and as a money-making scheme! Finally, imprisoned together by Nero, Peter finally tells Paul the truth before they go to their deaths as the first Christian martyrs. However, this is not before Nero tells them of his plan to create the Jewish diaspora by destroying Jerusalem, whilst inviting them to help him establish Christianity as the state religion to improve Roman moral standards and presumably sustain the longevity of the Roman Empire!

There are one or two concessions made by Brenton to acknowledge the undoubted flights of magnificent poetry and theological depths for which Paul is universally acclaimed. Brenton acknowledges in the programme notes that the world would be impoverished without Paul – even though he was wrong! There is a particularly good scene located in the chaos of the Corinthian church in which Paul soars to the sublime heights of 1 Corinthians 12 on the theme of love. One cannot help but feel that even the sceptical and bitter playwright is actually moved to wistful admiration at this point (one artist admiring another?). It is a pity that the audience is subsequently reduced to being forced to view this as the musings of an epileptic, trance-inspired visionary who sometimes comes out with profound utterances amidst the delusional rantings of this driven and fixated former teacher of Jewish law. It is surely asking a lot to expect a rational audience to accept both Paul and Jesus as poor deceived souls mirroring each other’s mental wanderings and self-delusion whilst simultaneously venturing an explanation of the origins of one of the world’s great religions. However, Brenton clearly has no other means of accounting for the incredible power that brought the church to birth and changed the world in such explosive fashion. It is here that the play founders through its sheer lack of plausibility and evident antipathetic agenda.

The characters are largely caricatures, designed on the one hand to appear filled with unshakeable faith, but necessarily ‘off the wall’ mentally, or on the other hand determinedly sane but necessarily sceptical. Evidently scepticism is to be understood as the norm, whilst the classical Christian tradition and those who sustain it are plainly to be seen as absurd and ‘wacky’. The ending, where Paul manages to convince the hitherto thoroughly sceptical Peter to embrace faith simply by endlessly repeating an early church creed in the face of certain death, is tragic-comic. Paul in the playwright’s hands faintly takes on the form of a ‘won’t take no for an answer’ stereotypical TV Anglican vicar. He is irritatingly sanctimonious, self-confident and verging on the ‘happy-clappy’, prompted and driven by epileptic fits, trances and obsessions. Faith is just obdurate self-delusion – even when confronted with the facts Paul refuses to budge from his obsession that Christ is somehow going to ‘return’. Peter is a problematic schizophrenic character, apparently unashamedly bearing no resemblance to the New Testament picture of him. Thoroughly sceptical, he is unconvincing in his irrational maintenance of a ridiculous untruth – then being unaccountably persuaded by Paul nevertheless suddenly to embrace as truth the self-created myth he has perpetuated for the last thirty years. This is what the playwright presumably wants us to believe is the paradox of faith!

James is presented as the brutally realistic protector of his brother, generally sneering his way through the plot and making common cause with the unpleasant Mary Magdalene who treats the emerging Christian story as a huge joke. The figure of Jesus is a pathetic, sad character, occasionally wandering his crazed way in and out of the play, and dying off anonymously somewhere in Syria, whilst Paul’s companion, Barnabas, turns out to be a state informer rather than an encourager. An equally implausible Nero is portrayed as enjoying the prospect of crushing the Jews whilst weighing up the utility of Christianity for preserving a sanitised Roman Empire.

Brenton’s Paul is not offensive to the Christian faith. It is not provocatively blasphemous and denigratory of God. The character of Paul repeatedly echoes selected New Testament Pauline expressions, even though sometimes obviously applied out of context. However, the overwhelming impression is of something ingeniously devised though wildly speculative and far-fetched. Like The Da Vinci Code, it should stimulate debate and the search for truth, and Christians should be content to be part of the process. Nicholas Hytner suggests devout Christians will not be satisfied by the play. Whilst this is undoubtedly the case, it is difficult to see this production as satisfying any but the most insistent iconoclasts who may enjoy the notion of 2000 years of church history being actually based on joke, accident and cover-up. On the other hand, thoughtful observers will register the sad, empty, soulless existentialism of the playwright, evident throughout. A pervasive sense of absurdity, gloom, meaninglessness and hopelessness is set in presumably deliberate contrast to the glorious hope of the gospel, so infuriatingly personified by Paul. The subtext of this intensely quixotic play seems to be that perhaps it is better to go through life deluded but happy in one’s delusion – hence the ‘exploration of the nature of faith’. Brenton’s Paul therefore carries an agenda of despair and hopeless scepticism. Consequently, it does not begin to attempt to do the real life of Paul justice. The authentic gospel story contained in the historical accounts of the New Testament actually turns out to be far more credible that the convoluted plot of Paul, based as it is largely on marginal and extra-biblical theories and myths, so that it amounts in the end to little more than well-performed fictional drama. But its presentation as fact what is obviously pure speculation, risks sinking into public consciousness, much as The Da Vinci Code has done. Nevertheless, Christians should see this as an opportunity not for clamour or censoriousness, but for seeking genuine rights of reply and the chance to tell the true story which offers the world much more hope than this bleak contribution.