CAST

Archbishop Thomas Becket - JASPER BRITTON

Chorus of Women of Canterbury - CLARE BRICE, ANNA BUCKLAND, FAYE MAUGHAN, BRONWEN CUNLIFFE, FIFI RUSSELL, STEPHANIE WARD

First Tempter & Knight - RUPERT BATES

Second Tempter & Knight - PIP BRIGNALL

Third Tempter & Knight- DAVID KEOGH

Fourth Tempter & Knight - DAVID SHELLEY

Priests- BRENT BOULDIN, JAKE DOVE, JAMES KENINGALE

Messenger / Priest - ISAAC DEAYTON

CREATIVE TEAM

Director - CECILIA DORLAND

Lighting Design: ANDREW ELLIS

Design: ILONA DEARDEN

Costume Sourcing & Design: CLAIRE NICOLAS

Company Singing: TOM WAKELEY

Chorus Voice & Movement: CLARE BRICE & FAYE MAUGHAN

Musical composition: JEAN- PHILIPPE MARTINEZ

Literary consultant: DR CHARLES MOSELEY

Company stage Manager: LAURA HARLING

PRODUCED by SCOTT WEDDELL

Becket died eight hundred and fifty years ago, in Canterbury Cathedral. Becket is dying tonight, on this stage. For us, for you.

In Eliot’s words, Becket’s death is “here and now”. There is no other time.

Walking by Southwark Cathedral, through the evening-deserted Borough Market, as I was preparing this play, I thought of bloody death and its strange poetry, inevitably also of the transcendence TS Eliot put into his dramatic rendering of the last days and cruel murder of Thomas Becket. Murder in the Cathedral haunts me, has been haunting me for decades. Verse, rhythm, candlelight and shadows, the nooks and crannies of medieval stone buildings, the bright colours of stained glass and the perpetual interrogation, the never-ending oscillation between life and death, action and passion, instant and eternity, all these things form a pattern of questions and aesthetic emotions. They turn and turn in my brains as on a wheel, the wheel of will-power central to the drama. relinquished

What does it matter, after all, now and to us, the reason which informed Thomas Becket’s decision to die, eight hundred years or so ago? It matters very little, except to the historians ,theologians, possibly the students of TS Eliot’s verse. And to one last category: those who tackle the play as a work of theatre and try to make sense of it. For the director, for the cast, for all concerned, individually and as a company, staging Murder in the Cathedral is taking up the Archbishop in single combat. Jousting – tiltyard skill of the highest level. A tournament out of which one is never sure to emerge victorious. The history of Becket’s murder is so well-knownthat forgetting Eliot’s play is not a historical pageant but a dramatic text dealing with the topic of martyrdom is all too easy. Murder in the Cathedral is a play steeped in European theatrical complex tradition, it presents the ritualistic quality of ancient Greek theatre and the religious discussion of medieval miracles and moralities. First and foremost, despite the historical anchorage, it is a work for the stage and for actors.

Directing Murder in the Cathedral is tackling the huge challenge of its central question: what makes a martyr give his life to a cause? Why would one sacrifice oneself to bear witness for the following generations? Nowadays, the question’s moral, ethical and above all religious implications seem a little pompous. Our contemporary, materialistic times, cynical yet sentimental, have little patience for these disturbing questions. Yet understanding the play requires to ponder them at length. I wanted to do that by working in great depth on the encounter between a text and an actor, between an elusive, verse-speaking character and a contemporary artist whose intelligence, vision and emotions provide the answer which shapes the play. I was blessed to travel that road with Jasper Britton. We both felt we had to listen to Eliot carefully and avoid making Becket the proud and inflexible character he is so often perceived to be. That would have been giving in to the Knights... Finally, for me, it’s something

Jasper told me one day about his vision of Becket which really helped me make sense of the character. He said he was “an enigma, a genius on another level”. Yes, Becket is on another plane, not in time but out of time. He’s isolated in the play as a man whose fate isolates in life from the common folk represented by the chorus, the scheming and ambitious knights-politicians and too worldly priests.

Well, we have done it – we have fought the Archbishop. He is duly dead, of course. Appropriately killed by Henry’s knights, he lies again in full glory in make-believe Canterbury. Swallowed back into the pattern of time. Yet we are not sure we were victorious. No, my Lord Archbishop, we are not sure.

When we disturbed you out of your rest to put you back on the stage, my Lord Archbishop, “we knew we were taking on a pretty stiff job” – verse drama, religious theme (seriously,martyrdom!), wordy preaching, visionary poetry with intellectual demands... the perfect exercisein going against the fashion of our time! Slight worry and – dare I say it? - from some of thepeople close to the company: was she going to stage the whole thing, without cuts! Heavens...Surely the sermon?... How can you deal with a play which “tells” too much, shows too little...? et in Murder in the Cathedral, as inall matters religious, the wholeargument revolves around theMystery – remove the mysteryand what is left? A simple“murder mystery”, indeed, in its“murder mystery”, indeed, in itsflattest form, a post dinnerentertainment with swords andblood and some beautiful wordsto make up the paucity of theaction and help one feel like oneis living in gloriously civilised times when nobody cares about an Archbishop’s sacrifice anymore. Enlightened times. For a while, before we started in depth work on the play, most of the cast were convinced that the Knights were right – their righteous anger justified. Worst of all, so will audiences be.

Because history seems to have proved it so. Becket, fanatic, zealot, obscure historical figure in ecclesiastical robes from the Norman days of mottes and baileys, wanted to die a martyr, had his will; anyway he’d asked for it, and how vain can one be who thinks he’ll rule from beyond the grave. Madness – of a seriously medieval kind. Exit Archbishop.

Except that ... Archbishop refuses to “exit” entirely, rather continues to “exist” - lurks among the pillars of the cathedral and among the shadows of our consciousness. How will any of us ever go back to the church where we ritualistically put him to death night after night without a lurch of the heart? And that includes you, audience. You too will remember that you shared in a mysterious communion, that you were witnesses as a man was put to death, albeit eight hundred or so years ago. Because it is also happening here and now. Becket is dying tonight, for us, for you.