Putting the Pulpit on the Stage

No sooner do I decide to treat theatre criticism as a brand of theology, God starts turning up on stage. While I still find it difficult to listen to any preacher who isn't either juggling snakes or playing with fire during the sermon, my transition from irritating late Romantic to irritating Holy Roller is gathering pace. Since the most entertaining churches seem to involve too much audience participation and the sort of simplistic textual analysis that revolts my Jesuit trained soul, it is fortunate that both Peter Brook and Greyscale have taken a metaphysical twist.

Brook went spiritual years ago: his film Meetings with Remarkable Men studied Gurdjieff, a proto-New Age guru who blended Sufism and Orthodox Christianity and he has been tramping the world since the late 1960s, fusing religious narratives with theatrical excellence and multicultural tolerance- most famously with the Mahabarata (Tramway, 1988). For 11 and 12, he examines the life of an Islamic holy man, and how a religious schism is exploited by a brutish colonial power.

Although I broadly agree with Brook's theology- really, we ought to be nice to each other- his play is tepid. The multiculturalism of his cast relects a dated vision of global unity and his optimism prevents him from exposing the violent consequences of the conflict. The apparently trivial distinction between the number of times that a prayer ought to be repeated led to "feuds, violence and massacres." Brook represents this by one wise-man being shouted at in the mosque. It is embarrassing being scolded in a place of worship (in retrospect, the priest had a point when he reminded me that comparing a burlesque dancer to the messiah was heretical), but it is not as bad as being hacked to death by a machete or even waterboarded by Rufus out of Rhymes With Purple.

Greyscale, on the other hand, come from a very different place. Author Selma Dimitrijevic is an atheist. A Prayer deals with a moment of doubt in God's absence. Yet through the surprised atheist's encounter with the divine, she draws the contours of sincere prayer's landscape, swooping between fear, anger and relief. It's a stunning, personal work that removes enough detail to echo a common spiritual journey. Coming at the idea of prayer without the hang-ups of organised practice, she presents religious processes as engaging, sincere and dynamic. It takes spirituality seriously, refusing to baulk at the complexity and conflict.

In his programme notes, Brook claims that "for Christians and Muslims alike, God through his prophets has given to mankind a clear and simple commandment: "Thous Shalt Not Kill"." Unfortunately, that is wrong: Brook is being wistful. The actual Old Testament Commandment is "Thou Shalt Not Murder", a very different injunction, and allowing Christians to excuse some heavy duty massacres. Besides, both Koran and Bible have some sweet alternatives to killing for the unjust. Some prophets were hot on forgiveness; usually the ones that got hacked up by their co-religionists. 11 and 12 sets up a clear dualism between Muslims who conspire with the state and those who serve God. It resonates nicely with the Christ mythos, but the corruption of religion into violence is rarely that simple.

Understandably, Brook is aiming for a middle ground between secular visions of crazy mystics and embattled fundamentalists, suggesting that reason and tolerance are at the core of "true" religious paths. Unfortunately, as his tale of Tierno Bokar shows, walking away from a fight doesn't stop it happening. Turning the other cheek can be a smug act of one-upmanship.

If the church has abdicated responsibility for taking moral questions seriously- fundamentalists insisting on errant Biblical truth and Popes calling paedophilia an "evil mystery"- the theatre can take this on. British Theatre came from the Mystery Play tradition, and the Jesuits knew how opera and ballet could be used as tools for preaching. For all its faults, Brook's emphasis on forgiveness reveals a strand of religion often obscured in the arguments between science and faith: A Prayer is a brave attempt to rehabilitate mystical experience. Theatre has always toyed with the symbolic and iconic, and the introduction of religious concepts and language, supported by rational, even sceptical, intelligence offers a vocabulary that can question the nature of the human condition.