It sounds like mission impossible. To celebrate this year’s 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, the RSC set itself the task of mounting a play about the controversies surrounding the translation. A drama, therefore, entirely lacking in drama. No action or spectacle, no romance or comedy, no surprise twists or last-minute poisonings. Just people talking. And for David Edgar, who accepted the commission, this was part of the attraction. ‘A meeting between people who are unrelated but share a common purpose,’ he tells me, ‘can be as exciting and vivid and active as that great staple of drama, the family meal. Even sitting around writing a letter to a relative is a recognisable form of human behaviour.’
We meet in a break from rehearsals. He’s in his early 60s, lean and tall, with a literary stoop, and he dresses in the featureless costume of the left-wing lifer. Personally, his air is kindly, pensive, faintly monastic, and he speaks in lengthy, fluting screeds of rumination. His bone-white skull, though naturally bald, might have been razed clean deliberately to encourage the chilly blasts of nature to spur his mind to greater feats of industry and virtue.
Writing the play’s dialogue, he tells me, was like creating a foreign language. ‘It would feel ridiculous for the translators to talk in contemporary vernacular while they’re debating how to render “In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth.” On the other hand, it would be difficult, and grating, to spend an evening hearing people saying “thee and thou” and “hadst and doeth”. So I’ve tried to compromise by keeping the vigour of Jacobean English and some of its formulations. The actors are neither speaking contemporary English nor are they speaking what could sound like cod-Shakespeare.’
Fair enough. But the real challenge, surely, is to create a show that appeals to people sitting in Stratford on the opening night. ‘The trick is to take the play into the contemporary world. And without pretending that the analogies can be simple or direct, I want people to draw modern parallels, particularly with religious fundamentalism.’ Is there a close fit? ‘A staggeringly close fit,’ he says, ‘between Protestant fundamentalism in the 16th and 17th centuries and Islamic fundamentalism now.’ He reels off a bullet-point list. ‘The religion of the book. The sacred text having unique authority. Hostility to images. Hostility to music. Simple dress. Overlap of Church and state. Reverence for martyrs. And a tendency to go to war over religion.’ And beards, I remind him. ‘I may not have drawn attention to beards because they draw attention to themselves.’ Was he troubled by the absence of women in the story?
‘It was a very male world,’ he admits. But two key figures, Elizabeth and Mary, were women. ‘And the right to read the Bible in English went with the right of women to read at all. Henry VIII, having published the Bible in English, got cold feet about it and passed legislation which banned anybody reading the Bible below the level of gentlewoman. So Henry was concerned that women were reading it.’
Edgar came to the subject as both an amateur and an unwitting expert. His old school, Oundle in Northamptonshire, was, he says, a ‘sternly Protestant, low-Church institution’. Its thunderous motto, ‘God Grant Grace’, Edgar describes as ‘monosyllabic, alliterative and expressive of a fervent Protestant wish’. ‘We went to chapel three times a week and we’d hear the Bible being read. So I continued to have a great affection towards it even when I’d stopped believing in it. One of the houses, Grafton, was named after Richard Grafton, publisher of the first Bible to be published in English. So I had this strange connection without knowing about it at the time.’
One of the key themes is the evolution of radicalism and its absorption into the political mainstream. ‘The play covers 80 years from the time of William Tyndale, the exiled leader of English Protestantism, and it ends with compromise and reconciliation. As someone who was 20 in 1968, I’m acutely aware of this: a generation that’s been involved in any sort of radicalism has a feeling of “been there, done that”. We’ve made our compromises with the real world, we’ve created good reforms, and now we can quietly enjoy the fruits.’ But does the present generation see it like that? No, he says, with some relish. ‘We have UK Uncut, and the student revolutionaries, and my Deep Green niece who’s constantly reproaching me for not making theatre in slate mines and community halls. And I say, “I was around at the start of the environmental movement and it’s splendid that it’s now entered the public consciousness.” And she says, “But not nearly enough. People like you have sold out.”’
Has he? I ask if he was in Paris, in 1968, throwing stones at gendarmes, and he admits that he was merely ‘a student at Manchester’. But he used his artistic imagination to participate in ‘les évènements’. ‘I wrote a character who drove to Paris in a Morris Minor 1,000 van, with the wood on the back. And I possessed a Morris Minor van with wood on the back. Clearly, this was an attempt to imagine what it would have been like to have driven there. It was a sort of test on myself. If I wrote something about me shifting far to the right in middle-age that might stop it really happening.’ It worked apparently.
He remains on ‘the emotional left’ of the Labour party. He voted for Diane Abbott in last year’s leadership election. ‘Because I thought it was fairly disgraceful that everyone else cited immigration, and her first statement was “Immigration didn’t lose us the election and we should recapture civil liberties.”’ But his disappointment at her failure to win seems to have been short-lived. ‘I knew she wasn’t going to get elected. So my second vote was my real vote. For Ed Miliband.’ He feels Ed’s had a tough first year. ‘But it happens to everybody; it happened to Cameron, too, despite all the huskies.’ And the press have overemphasised ‘Ed’s downside, him being nerdy’, he says. ‘I think David Miliband’s pretty nerdy, too.’ He feels positive about the party but expresses it in negative terms. ‘We’re not in a terrible state. But Labour traditionally loses power for a long time.’ And how does that feel? ‘Nerve-racking.’
David Edgar’s Written on the Heart runs in rep at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon until 10 March 2012.
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