The Quaker Theatre Company at Sutton Meeting House Photo: Gordon Steele
The Word
I went to see the play at Forest Hill, one stop in its tour round Britain
The most famous recent example of a ‘miracle’ play was Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle; it was so distasteful that the BBC kept it under wraps for twenty years. A young girl, comatose as a result of a road accident, was apparently cured by an act of rape performed by a personable young man. Angel or devil? The Word (Ordet), a 1925 play by Danish playwright Kaj Munk, is from the same imaginative stable. It poses the question, ‘Do we still believe in the kind of faith that can work miracles?’ Reduced down and updated from a three-act full-cast play to a forty-five-minute four-hander, it is being performed by the Quaker Theatre Company at a Meeting house somewhere near you. This is the company’s second annual UK tour.
Two psychiatrists argue, in a rather desultory fashion, about reason versus faith. Their arguments are predictable enough: ‘religion flourishes where there’s poverty and ignorance’ versus ‘there must be more to life than dust and ashes.’ He is the rationalist; she is the (very pregnant) Quaker, married to an about-to-be Anglican clergyman. There are some in-jokes: ‘Never mind what Doug says, what can you say?!’ gets the biggest laugh of the evening, and some home truths: ‘Even your quaint little sect has its dogmas – “war is bad”.’ The pace hots up when two traumatised patients are introduced: she has inexplicably become mute; he has witnessed the death of his partner in a road accident and now believes he’s Jesus. You can probably see where this is heading. At least it provides a nice context for some familiar bits of the Bible. ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician’.
After the performance, the cast lead a discussion on the issues raised. It turns out that the older actor is a rationalist; the younger man is an evangelical Christian. ‘Wouldn’t it be more interesting if you swapped parts?’ said one audience member at Forest Hill Meeting. Alan Avery, whose brainchild this is, hopes that plays like this will challenge Friends on their home ground and will also act as a form of outreach. I rather doubt the latter. In pursuit of the former, Alan put the rationalist case with such fervour – ‘Friends have become more humanist, so the links to Christ are now seen as a bit of an embarrassment’ – that some of the audience thought he must be playing devil’s advocate. He wasn’t, but he galvanised Forest Hill Friends into an articulate defence, if not of the existence of miracles, then certainly of experiential faith, inspired ministry and poetic imagery.
Kaj Munk, we learned, was also a Lutheran pastor and outspoken opponent of Nazism; he was put to death in 1944. One Friend pointed out, ‘if Quakers (in Britain) are dying, it’s not because we’re not doing enough’; another that, if we believe that our strength has been in not having a creed, then the aggressive secularism advocated by Alan Avery and others was trying to force us into precisely such an ‘either/or’ situation. A lively evening, then, if not exactly a bundle of laughs. For next year’s tour, though, the Quaker Theatre Company are promising us ‘George Fox and Margaret Fell get stuck in a lift’. Bring it on.
The Quaker Theatre Company is touring until 23 October. See www.quakertheatrecompany.co.uk for further information.
