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ARTS: The time for resurrection is now: James Woodall talks to Peter Gill as he restages
one of the great stories of
Europea history.
Financial Times; Oct 6, 2001
By JAMES WOODALL
John Osborne is not a playwright you'd automatically associate with religious upheaval.
There is some evidence that he
became more religious towards the end of his life - he died in 1994 - but in his great
plays, Look Back in Anger, The
Entertainer or Inadmissible Evidence, the protagonists often relish a kind of godlessness
while railing against their inner
emptiness. So perhaps the most surprising work in Osborne's output his 1961 play,
Luther, which deals with the spiritual
struggles of the 16th-century German reformer and the political fallout of his momentous
break with Rome.
Osborne was, he later admitted, in no hurry to finish the play after overcoming what he
called his "natural indolence" in
the autumn of 1960. But completed it was, and then staged, in Nottingham, with the late
Tony Richardson directing and
Albert Finney in the lead role. Astonishingly, although it's been done from time to time
in repertory, tonight'sng of
Luther at the Royal National Theatre will be its first London outing in 40 years.Its
subject matter may have made it
unfashionable and irrelevant. The instigator of modern Protestantism is not, arguably,
someone who has much to say in a
deeply secular age.
Writer and director Peter Gill, who saw the original, was asked recently by the Royal
National Theatre to revive it
and he was glad to take it on: "I have memories of some scenes in 1961, certain
images, and of Luther's inner turmoil.
But strangely that doesn't correspond at all with the play I've read again and
directed." Perhaps, after 40 years, times
have changed? "Yes, and the play works now. I can't really account for its not being
done over all that time. Maybe it
has something to do with the fact that the play has a big cast." Compared with most
contemporary drama, the cast is
indeed large (14 characters) and the part of Luther - played in this production by young
British star Rufus Sewell -
forbidding. "Most theatres wouldn't find it commercially viable," saysGill.
"And it's been pretty hair-raising staging it at
the Olivier. Osborne wrote it for a proscenium theatre and was meticulous in his stage
directions. Much has had to be
made right for the hugespace of the Olivier. And the more you perform and work on
the text, the more you realise
how cunningly constructed it was."The play depicts Martin Luther's early years as an
Augustinian monk and his personal
angst over the form of his faith (as Osborne said of his reasons for writing the play,
"I was not yet reconciled to an
inheritance of the perpetual certainty of doubt"), and the events surrounding
Luther's central act of defiance in 1517, when
he fastened to a church door "95 theses" disputing, in essence, the practice of
issuing indulgences for a price to cleanse
ordinary folk of their sins. Luther loathed the abuses this had led to, and indeed history
is clear that Johann Tetzel, a
Dominican under direct orders from the Vatican (played at the RNT by Richard Griffiths),
was zealous in his extortion
of funds for the rebuilding of St Peter's in Rome.
Act Three presents the Diet of Worms in 1521, when Luther was called before Emperor
Charles V to recant. He did not.
The Peasants' Revolt followed. Luther first encouraged, then turned against them, and by
the 1530s Europe had been
split, in confessional terms, for all time. It is, of course, one of the great stories of
European history. Osborne responded
to it with a mixture of rich theatricality - staging the Diet of Worms required a special
chutzpah, to which he was no
stranger - and acute psychological veracity. In Osborne's reading, Luther's afflictions
and aspirations, tics and tantrums,
make him both suffering hero and fallible human, one of the stage's most memorable
doubters. "My bones fail," he says
in Scene One,"my bones are shattered and fall away, my bones fail and all that's left
of me is a scraped marrow and a
dying jelly" - offering just a taste of Luther's intense self-scrutiny and the play's
visceral language.
But does it have anything to tell us in 2001? "It's about many things," Peter
Gill replies: "faith and doubt, fathers and sons
and a challenge to authority. It's about the nurturing of talent, by an older man - the
monk Staupitz (played by Timothy
West) - of a younger, Luther. And though I'm not the sort of director who likes to
make large claims in order to promote a
political point, I'm struck, in the light of the World Trade Center attacks, by one thing
that became uncomfortably clear in
rehearsal. Here is this man proclaiming from his pulpit an extremely fundamental
view of Christianity. Lutheranism is not about
that now, and if there'd been no Luther, something would have happened in Germany anyway.
But given what we now know
about a type of fundamentalism, this inflexibility has a shocking resonance."
And what about Gill's own religious affiliations?
"I was a cradle Catholic. My mother had all the Catholic dogma and I was raised,
strictly, inside it, in South Wales. You carry
around that kind of upbringing wherever you go. But that's not what matters. Luther's a
great play by a great playwright. It's
been unjustly neglected and now's the right time for it, and at the National. That, after
all, is what a national theatre is for."
Copyright: The Financial Times Limited
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