God's Stage?

Please note:

This script cannot exactly reflect the transmission, as it was prepared before the service was broadcast. It may include editorial notes prepared by the producer, and minor spelling and other errors that were corrected before the radio broadcast.

It may contain gaps to be filled in at the time so that prayers may reflect the needs of the world, and changes may also be made at the last minute for timing reasons, or to reflect current events.

Good morning. I’m standing on Charing Cross road in Central London, right outside the Garrick Theatre. Today we mark the 300th anniversary of the birth of David Garrick, who made his way from Lichfield to London in March 1737 with just a few coins in his pocket, in the company of his former schoolmaster Samuel Johnson, to try to make his fortune. They were a little like two real-life Dick Whittingtons. In time, they’d both become some of London’s most famous adopted children.

It’s often struck me that we’re all performers in different ways, with our own ceremonials, rituals, costumes and scripts. Just looking at my own family, my father was an army officer. My brother is a writer of plays, a theatre director and an actor. And I’m a priest in the C of E.

Garrick’s father, of French origins, was also a captain in the British army; his mother was the daughter of a Lichfield vicar. So he had similar currents of influence in his background. Who knows what part they played in making him one of Britain’s greatest thespians – an actor, writer, theatre manager and producer whom his contemporaries proclaimed as the greatest actor they’d ever seen – and, some said, one who would never be surpassed?

In 1741, as a young, unknown performer, he transfixed a London audience with his performance as Shakespeare’s Richard III, and shot to overnight stardom. It’s one of the great romantic stories of theatrical history. His magic was his naturalism. He revived a sense that in witnessing theatrical performances, we become witnesses to the real world of human interaction. We are confronted with ourselves. We see our human world on the stage, and once that has happened, then it’s a small step to thinking of this world as itself like a stage - and all the men and women, well – we’re the players….

MUSIC: Teach me, my God and King (t. Sandys)
sung by St Martin’s Voices - BBC Recording.

SCENE 1

The roots of ancient drama are Greek.

Early Greek tragedies drew on the great Homeric legends and brought characters from those legends – alive and embodied - onto the stage. The performances were ritual events – often performed as part of religious festivals in honour of the gods. They are a reminder that drama is a highly-charged event, in which we come into the presence of deep forces in ourselves and the world around us, and are prompted to ask large questions about the horizon of our existence: what sort of acting area are we in, who is watching, and what is at stake in what we do and say?

The simplest ingredients of Greek drama were actors themselves: the minimum you needed were a protagonist and an antagonist.  The moment you had these two, you had the capacity for interaction, and thus the possibility of a drama.

Buried in the heart of those two technical terms – protagonist and antagonist – is the word agon, which is the Greek world for struggle.

Drama is about the collision of forces – human wills, natural events, desires, perspectives, plans… Sometimes it’s also about human differences coming together in glorious symphony – we see this in comedy (though human tensions often need quite energetic orchestration even in comedy). In tragedy, the tensions between us often entail terrible loss. Either way, agon is the beating heart of drama as an art form.

Theatrical performance gives us an occasion to reflect on our own agon – the lives we lead are full of struggle, and we are always negotiating with others in a world that is in more and more ways like a single great stage. The distillation of this experience in the dramatic arts gives us opportunities to learn from other human stories, choices and consequences as they are retold to us in performance, and also to feel a deep thrill of recognition that we are all in this together. We share an acting area, and others struggle with their parts as we do. Perhaps this is why even the darkest dramas can give us a sort of uplift. Aristotle called it catharsis.

The idea that the world is a stage runs deep in the history of Christian theology. It has roots in the philosophy of Plato, and finds expression in the thought of great Protestant thinkers like John Calvin, who often talked about the ‘theatre of the world’ in which the story of God’s providence was gradually unfolding, as well as Roman Catholic spiritual teachers like Ignatius of Loyola, who invited Christians to imagine their way into biblical narratives and explore how they would act and react in dialogue with Christ. Both traditions ask us to think about ourselves as agents in something bigger than ourselves, whose actions really count for something.

That the Bible is a human drama hardly needs saying. Part of what is astonishing about it – and part of what makes it different from the thought-world of Plato - is its assumption that God is a player in the drama, and interacts with human creatures. This is vividly captured in the night-time encounter of Jacob – the one after whom the children of Israel were named - with a mysterious opponent, in the Book of Genesis. The human drama of his deception of his father Isaac, his brother Esau, and then his father-in-law Laban – as well as his great love for his wife Rachel – is shown also to be a drama with God, who (in an ambiguous form: maybe human, maybe angelic) confronts him at a river crossing in the deal of night, and wrestles with him. Protagonist and antagonist. The bare bones of the human drama are rarely barer than here.

READING: GENESIS 32
And [Jacob] rose up that night, and took his two wives, and his two womenservants, and his eleven sons, and passed over the ford Jabbok.
And he took them, and sent them over the brook, and sent over that he had.
And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.
And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him.
And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.
And he said unto him, What is thy name? And he said, Jacob.
And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.
And Jacob asked him, and said, Tell me, I pray thee, thy name. And he said, Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name? And he blessed him there.
And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.
Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children;
And walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweetsmelling savour.
See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise,
Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.
Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is.
And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit;
Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord;
Giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ;
Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God.

MUSIC: Ave Maris Stella from ‘Vespers of 1610’) - Claudio Monteverdi
sung by The Sixteen (Album: Vespers of 1610, Coro COR16126)

SCENE 2

Jacob’s dramatic facing of God at Jabbok Ford becomes the context for his facing of his estranged brother Esau shortly afterwards. It goes well; what could have been a tragedy becomes a reconciliation worthy of the most joyous Shakespearean comedy. Jacob emerges alive and feeling blessed from both encounters.

Our struggle with God often mirrors our struggle with our fellow human beings. When things are out of joint in one realm, they are usually out of joint in the other. And when we are right with God, we are right with our neighbours (and vice versa, as Jesus taught in his two great commandments.

I’ve now moved a few minutes from the Garrick Theatre to St Paul’s Church in Covent Garden, known as the Actors Church. The religious dimensions of theatre in ancient Greece were lost to view in the early Church, and theatre became associated with the Roman games – vicious, bloody and brutal, and often especially victimizing of persecuted Christians. The human empathy that theatre is capable of fostering became something more cruel: mere spectacle, in which human beings were objectified for sport. It’s not surprising that on these terms the church wanted nothing to do with theatre.

But the instinct for performance runs deep in human beings, and its value reasserts itself in unlikely places. Indeed, it’s sometimes said that it was in the liturgy of the Anglo-Saxon church that English theatre truly came to birth.

The Quem queritis? (formally promoted by the Winchester Regularis Concordia of c.973) was a mini-drama within the Easter morning liturgy, enacted by monks, some of whom played the parts of the women going to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ body, and some the parts of the angels who asked them ‘Whom do you seek?’.

Though a tiny fragment, it’s a touching record of the way that playing out a dramatic encounter, so central to the Christian story, brought it alive for Christians over a millennium ago. It sowed a seed for the profusion of re-enactments of the Christian story that take place both inside and beyond the parameters of formal worship – in Passion Plays (including those performed here in London each Holy Week, in Trafalgar Square), as well as children’s nativity plays, films and musical oratorios by Bach and Handel.

In medieval times, it led to the spilling out of liturgy into new forms (mystery plays, for instance). The Church was canny at harnessing the power of drama to instruct and attract – and there was a permeability between church spaces and public spaces that made it possible for religious folk drama to blossom.

There weren’t professional actors in these times; everyone could play a part. The streets and squares were performance spaces; whole cities joined in. At certain times of year, people’s local worlds world? really did become a stage.

This deep symbiosis between church liturgy and dramatic performance shouldn’t perhaps surprise us all that much. Both involve so many of the same ingredients: a raised platform, a congregation of people, lighting, costumes, scripted words, music… In both cases, there is a sense that we gather to witness to significant, meaning-laden actions. Things of moment are enacted before us and between us.

It seems apt that ‘Little Davy’ Garrick’s early performances in Lichfield took place in the episcopal palace. One of his early supporters was Gilbert Walmesley, registrar of the diocese, and it was he who arranged for his young protégé to use the bishop’s residence for amateur dramatics.

As a minor canon at Westminster Abbey, reponsible for choreographing huge liturgical occasions with casts of thousands, Jamie Hawkey knows a bit about the similarities between liturgy and theatre…

REFLECTION: Revd Dr Jamie Hawkey (Clare College, Cambridge)

MUSIC: O taste and see - Ralph Vaughan Williams
sung by Christ Church Cathedral Choir, directed by Stephen Darlington (Album: Vaughan Williams Mass in G minor, Nimbus CD NI5083)

SCENE 3

I’m outside the Globe Theatre on London’s South Bank. Historically, the South Bank had the benefit of being outside the tighter jurisdiction of civil and ecclesiastical authority that prevailed within the ancient walls of the City of London – and was also at a remove from the powerful influence of the Royal Court at Westminster. And so it was here that England’s first purpose-built theatres sprang up in the 16th century.

Prior to that, drama had been dependent on the patronage of church and court – almost exclusively.

But 16th-century London was growing larger and wealthier than ever before, and a new, bourgeois class of Londoners had time and money to spare – and wanted ways to spend it. Theatre as part of an entertainment industry began – and new subjects and new approaches (often more daring and scurrilous than any that had been seen before) were tested out in theatres like this. A newly-Protestant England might have lost the drama of the Mass, with Christ coming among the people in his real presence in bread and wine. The Holy Communion became for many instead an act of solemn recollection. But theatre could still endow the recall of historical and mythological events with an immediate sense of presence – of the now!  The Prologue of Shakespeare’s Henry V constitutes the audience as a sort of corporate body, a bit like those about to experience a theatrical equivalent to ‘real presence’. All they need to bring with them is their imaginations…

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,
Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire
Crouch for employment. But pardon, and gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon! since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide on man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth;
For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,
Admit me Chorus to this history;
Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.

The ‘wooden “O”’ of the theatre becomes like an ecclesiastical space, or perhaps an image of the Kingdom of England itself – still wounded by religious conflict and in need of almost liturgical acts of confessions and forgiveness (note how the word “pardon!’ keeps appearing in the Prologue’s words). It also needs shared vision, and shared purpose. The Prologue acknowledges that for theatre to work – as for a nation to work - there needs to be reciprocity: a sort of pact, or covenant, between people. In every performance this covenant needs to be renewed. It’s a covenant between actors and audience, and between the actors themselves.

We’ve become familiar with the idea of the artist as genius – the solo singer, or the eccentric painter with his or her unique vision. They stand out like solitary eminences. But one of the fascinations of theatre is that it’s an art form that depends upon reciprocity, or covenant. Upon not being better than everyone else. It’s about being as related and in tune with everyone else as you can possibly be. The same is true of orchestral music. Rehearsal is a way of tempering your individualism, not so as to eradicate it, but so as to put it into the service of a collective creativity that is greater than the sum of its parts.

In this reading from Chapter 5 of Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, we hear him calling for a similar sort of reciprocity, for the sake of the Church’s performance of its true calling.

READING: Ephesians 5:1-2, 15-21
Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children;
And walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweetsmelling savour.
See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise,
Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.
Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is.
And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit;
Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord;
Giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ;
Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God.

MUSIC: Breathe on me, breath of God
sung by the King’s Singers (Album: Reflections: Choral Essays Vol. 2 - Salvationist Publishing 24994)

SCENE 4

Early Protestants in England saw the potential of theatre as a means of communication and persuasion – having a power not unlike that of the sermon (indeed, the Chorus who speaks the Prologue in Henry V is not unlike a brilliant preacher). Many of them wrote plays to propagate their theological ideas, claiming that ‘Preachers, Printers and Playwrights’ were 'a triple bulwark against the triple crown of the Pope’. But their similarity also made them rivals – and empty seats in church were frequently blamed on the cheap pleasures of theatrical entertainment. The fraught history of Church and theatre took another turn, and they were at odds again. Many Protestants criticized plays for the fact that they were ‘pretend’ – in other words, a form of institutionalised falsehood.

Eventually, during the time of the English Commonwealth, Oliver Cromwell shut the theatres down altogether and made acting an imprisonable offence.

But, thank God, English drama came back again, and, in time, the theatres reopened. Under the influence of people like David Garrick, they would once again command deep respect for their ability to address profound questions of truth and meaning, even under the guise of ‘make-believe’. Garrick required his audiences to behave – not to wander in and out as they pleased. And he required his actors not just to put on a stylized show – going through the motions in a set of stock gestures and intonations –but to tap into something more authentic and touching. There’s more than one kind of truth. Real human agony and real human joy can be truthfully conveyed and explored even through dramatic inventions.

The search for the ‘real’ – the quest for what makes a meaningful action, a virtuous person, a good life, or an authentic relationship – is arguably still one of the primary reasons we want to sit and watch a play. It’s a sort of tacit confession that we think there is meaning, or at least insight, to be had from seeing ourselves reflected back in this peculiar and intense art form. And each performance that actors put out there for others to watch – often very courageously making themselves vulnerable in the process – is an invitation to us to come to judgement on what they’re offering. If the stage is a sort of microcosm of the world, then perhaps we might say that the audience sits in the place of God.

MUSIC: Benedicimus Deum Caeli (from ‘Strathclyde motets’) - James MacMillan
sung by The Sixteen (Album: MacMillan Miserere, Coro COR16096)

Our prayers this morning are led by Rev Lindsay Meader, Senior Chaplain of Theatre Chaplaincy UK.

God of time and eternity, we give you thanks for the life and legacy of David Garrick, for his profound influence on the theatre, for his originality, intuition and passion. Strengthen and sustain all those who work in the theatre today. Give them faith, resilience and authenticity as they seek to forge careers in a profession characterised by ongoing transition, uncertainty and frequent rejection.

We give you thanks for the power of the performing arts to touch our souls and give us a deeper understanding of our shared humanity; to open our eyes to fresh perspectives; to enter into different realities from our own; to explore our own lives and the possibilities and potential deep within; and to provoke laughter, empathy and inspiration.

Help us to empathise with those we don’t understand or find difficult and those who find us difficult. Challenge and comfort us in equal measure and make us sensitive to the struggles of others, that we may act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with you, our God.

Theatre is able to portray the world both as it is and as it could be. We pray for all those whose lives are diminished by the rhetoric and consequences of hatred, division and discrimination. We pray for the downtrodden and dispossessed, the disillusioned and the despairing. Shine the light of your love in the darkest places of our world, bringing the hope of peace and reconciliation and help us believe that in you, nothing is impossible. Amen.

LORD’S PRAYER

BLESSING - Revd Simon Grigg, St Paul’s Covent Garden

When Garrick’s newly-refurbished Drury Lane reopened in September 1747 with a performance of The Merchant of Venice, a prologue by Johnson was read that included the words:

The drama’s laws the drama’s patrons give,
For we, who live to please, must please to live.

The audience will give its verdict; the actors’ very existence and future hang on it.

And perhaps that reminder that in every line we utter, every touch of hand or eye, every act of violence or compassion, every bond we seal and every betrayal we perform, there may be a divine audience – and that when the curtain falls on all our yesterdays, on our little life, rounded by a sleep – there may be silence or applause, is the deepest reason why theatre still grips us to the core.

MUSIC: Angel Voices, ever singing (t. Angel Voices)
sung by the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge (Album: Hymns from King’s,  KGS0014)