The London Times
Monday October 8
Theatre
Divine Mystery
by JeremyKingston
A Revival of Osborne's Luther Leaves a
Search for Meaning Too
Anyone surveying the theatrical landscape in the early 1960s could have joked
that you wait 20 years for an historical epic and then three come along at once.
Curiously, all three were plays that worried at religion. Thomas More chose to put the
service of God before his service to the state; Pizarro wavered between the Christian God
as Man and the Inca Man-God; and Luther . . . well, it is not easy to see what John
Osborne wanted to show us about the founder of Protestantism.
He is a man who looked back in anger at the Catholic Church’s history and rebelled
against it, but after he makes his celebrated declaration — “Here I stand, etc”
— halfway through the second act Osborne’s dramatic grasp of the historical
situation fatally slackens. Peasants rush on and are slaughtered, but we are not told why
or by whom. Luther the rebel, the golden-tongued, the constipated, is at the core of
Osborne’s play, but what is the play about, exactly? Peter Gill’s production is
the first to be seen in London since its Royal Court premiere in 1961, and he confidently
uses and fills the grim Olivier stage with bold scenic effects. Alison Chitty’s
design places a great Romanesque doorway at the centre of the rear wall, to which Rufus
Sewell’s Luther will eventually hammer his thesis against indulgences. Long tables
stretch towards us; lines of monks publicly confess; there is ritualised coming and going
— and though at last this looks like filling the stage because it’s an absurdly
big stage that has to be filled, most of the ways in which Gill moves his cast about on it
show his flair for visual excitement.
Equally, in the great set pieces that Osborne wrote, for Luther’s confrontation with
Cardinal Cajetan (Malcolm Sinclair at his suavest) or Tetzel’s hard sell for
indulgences, this production allows the actors to let the words sing out. Richard
Griffiths’s Tetzel plays the audience like a music-hall star, swerving between
cajolery and threat, his face bulging like a zephyr at full blast. Sewell’s
face is gaunt, haunted by a religious panic that believably grabs hold of itself to become
fundamentalist frenzy. His performance is at its most powerful when in the pulpit,
shovelling scorn on the craze for relics, but elsewhere too, when brought before
superiors, his self-defences have a mellifluous and attractive cogency. Osborne
makes much of the sluggish movement of Luther’s bowels, his eventual relief
mysteriously identified with divine truth, but Sewell’s stomach cramps and attacks of
the staggers are a wee bit too picturesque to carry conviction.
Osborne, himself a Christian, may have been intrigued by his hero’s problems with
fathers, both the natural variety and the eternal, and he seems to argue that not until he
became a father himself did Luther find happiness. But the shift from the worldwide to the
domestic is a bewildering let-down. Sewell’s face, fitfully visible through the smoke
of burning books, stirs memories of the Wizard of Oz, but take away the glamorous staging
and both Oz and Luther turn out to have a smaller stature than expected. |
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