'A one-woman dramatisation of key moments in the life of Elizabeth Hooton, early Quaker and mentor to George Fox.' Photo: Lynn Morris as Elizabeth Hooton
Lover of Souls, by Journeyman Theatre
Production by Journeyman Theatre. Review by Fred Ashmore
Don’t Journeymen Theatre come up with surprises for us all? Perhaps their best known play on a Quaker theme is Red Flag over Bermondsey, but there’s so much more in their body of work. Friends and guests flocked to Kingston Quaker Centre last month to watch a performance of their wonderful Lover of Souls, a one-woman dramatisation of key moments in the life of Elizabeth Hooton, early Quaker and mentor to George Fox.
What led a seventeenth-century farmer’s wife to leave a comfortable home in a remote East Midlands village, to become a travelling Quaker minister, enduring persecution and prison, confronting Cromwell and Charles II, making the dangerous Atlantic crossing several times and ending her days in Jamaica?
Hooton and other early Quakers experienced the English civil war in all its viciousness. Out of this crucible emerged what historians usually call ‘The Protestant Sects’: Ranters, Seekers, Baptists, Muggletonians, Fifth Monarchists and, of course, Quakers.
Looking at Hooton’s life and sufferings casts a clear light into the tangled skein of seventeenth-century religious belief, when the most important issue was that of individual salvation. Early Quakers turned this issue on its head by advocating and embracing a radical, practical and socialist theology. Hooton and her contemporaries were fearless in speaking truth to power and utilising the impact of disruption, whether it be a church service or a gathering at the king’s court.
Lover of Souls is one of Journeymen’s earlier works, but it’s a brilliant play for today, when many of us are feeling dispirited from our long experience of the pandemic and are needing, perhaps, a prompt into nonviolent direct action. It was a wonderful performance, reminding us of the passion, energy and urgency which infused early Quakers.
One of the reasons for the conviction in this performance might be that Lynn Morris shares many of the characteristics of Elizabeth Hooton, including coming from the same small village of Skegby. If you’re lucky enough to hear a performance, you may be sure that the dialect and idiom is authentic. I particularly loved Elizabeth Hooton’s trenchant assault on the established clergy of her time: ‘Pulpit-twaddle tub!’ she called out one priest for his ‘hogswill’ (sermonising). And when she was jailed for her pains, she wrote: ‘And when they bring in the drunken priest, to hear prayers or speak after his own invention, they lock me away but summon all the rest to come and hear his fictions.’
I can also recommend that when you go to the performance you try to acquire the bread dough which features briefly. I managed to make a loaf the next day. It too was authentic, nourishing and full of flavour.
Fred is from Kingston Meeting. To talk to Journeymen Theatre about a performance email lynnmorris32@yahoo.co.uk or call 07791 210687.
