Theatre
Michael Portillo - Eternity in an hour
Published 21 June 2004
Theatre - A complex historical journey is delivered with flawless timing. By Michael Portillo
Protestants
Soho Theatre, London W1
I am writing this review the day after seeing - perhaps "hearing" would be a better word - Robert Welch's play for a single actor, Protestants. I have stacked around me the poems of William Blake, and histories of Martin Luther, Elizabeth I, Charles I and Oliver Cromwell. If I had them on my shelves, I ought also to consult works on football hooliganism and the Troubles in Ireland. My notebook is full of the scribbles I made as I tried to jot down Welch's sonorous phrases as they tumbled from the mouth of the solo performer Paul Hickey. The morning after the night before, I feel disturbed and provoked by what I heard, and stimulated to research its sources.
Welch, a Cork man who is dean of the faculty of arts at the University of Ulster, might describe this, his first play, as an effort to elaborate his understanding of Protestantism. Yet the press release claims that "it is not about the Protestant identity in Northern Ireland and does not deal with black and white issues". The comment is justified by the complexity of a piece that, in less than an hour, carries us back across centuries and whisks us geographically from Wittenberg, through Wexford and Armagh, to Mississippi.
Hickey has no rest through that journey. Starting out as an Ulster narrator, he is transformed into the Virgin Queen, becomes the constipated author of the 95 Theses, is metamorphosed into a Glasgow Rangers thug and re-emerges in the Deep South as a white bigot, a Christian fundamentalist fooling with rattlesnakes and wrestling with Satan. It is a faultless performance of terrifying energy. Welch's prose is highly poetic, and he weaves into it couplets from Blake's "Auguries of Innocence".
The director, Rachel O'Riordan, and designer, Gary McCann, supply Hickey with a bare circular set and a few min- imalist and improbable props. Half a blade from a circular power saw, worn at the back of Hickey's neck, suggests Elizabeth I's ruff. A Zimmer frame held an inch from the ground hints at the swish of her skirts. The hose from a petrol pump conjures up a young man living in a place so remote that he feels like he's pumping gas on Mars, and wrapped around the body, the hose becomes a deadly rattler. One by one, Hickey tosses the props from the stage, as though angry with these symbols of prejudice and hate.
Welch's own prejudices are interest- ing. He makes Elizabeth I a villain for sabotaging the peace accord made out of weakness by the Earl of Essex with the Catholic rebel the Earl of Tyrone. I suspect that the queen's real concern was whether Essex was loyal. "He never draws sword but to make knights," she complained, in reference to his failure to engage the enemy. On the other hand, Martin Luther is treated sympathetically. In Welch's script, Luther eloquently expresses how abhorrent it is that the pope venerates saintly relics as though "these bits and pieces" were themselves sacred. It sounds as if Welch shares that distaste.
The play illustrates Protestant fanaticism in the present day with an episode in which the Glasgow thug meets up with a Belfast lad to plot a violent assault in Barcelona, where the football club has signed a player from Glasgow Celtic. The Belfast lad is not - or is no longer - a free agent able to create mayhem just for the fun of it. He has to consult, because his organisation has a political wing and there are operational priorities to be considered. The Scottish hoodlum feels betrayed: "Where does that leave the Battle of Boyne?" Nowadays religious hatred is controlled, Welch seems to say, to be switched off and on by figures in authority as a tool in a political and military struggle.
There is a paradox in that. Because what Welch perhaps admires in Protestantism is the protest, not just against popery, but against all man-made authority. Welch's Luther declares that nothing can come between a man and God, certainly not priests. He advocates a priesthood of all believers. The play's last words look forward to the New Jerusalem, in which there will be no churches and no temples, where "all God's people [are] prophets".
This is presumably why Welch pays tribute to Blake, whose poems rejected authority. Blake evidently held the view that humans need no priestly intermediaries to find God: "To see a world in a grain of sand/And Heaven in a wild flower,/Hold infinity in the palm of your hand/And eternity in an hour." Faith is inspired not by saintly relics, but by the beauty of creation.
As Welch puts it: "I am free when I am free of what people want to tell me. All stories are lies. I protest against these stories. I protest. I am a Protestant."
This was an evening of wild and whirling words. As with Blake, what Welch means by it all is obscure.
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