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.
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