Dolan Cummings
posted 21 November 2005

Even before Howard Brenton's new play begins, the set, designed by Vicki Mortimer, invites comparisons between the situation in the Holy Land two thousand years ago and the situation today: we are in a land scarred by war. In an early joke, Saul, then a Temple Guard charged with hunting down heretics, fires up his men on the road to Damascus by asking, 'When have we Jews been frightened of a raid into a foreign country?', to knowing amusement in the audience.

But Brenton is less concerned with making points about Israel/Palestine or the role of religion in politics than with settling accounts with religion itself. While Paul has always been regarded as the epitome of the authoritarian strain in Christianity, and disliked by more left-wing and feminist Christians, Brenton is fundamentally sympathetic to his subject. Paul is a secular account of the conversion of Saul and the resulting evangelical career of Paul the apostle, with all the supernatural bits neatly ironed out. It is the story of how a decent man founded a religion premised on a myth but embodying noble sentiments.

In the lead, Adam Godley comes across a bit like Tim Booth, the slightly wacky frontman of the indie band James, who won something of a cult following in the loved-up early 1990s with such anthemic hits as 'Sit Down' and 'Come Home'. It's easy to imagine that this Paul's religious passion is simply a function of his excitable personality. He's a lovely guy, but a bit… intense.

There are moments when a more interesting side of Paul emerges: in his disdain for superstition, his exasperation at his co-religionists' fetish for ritualistic details that just don't matter, and his embarrassment at their fondness for speaking in tongues: 'Yes, all right, but in moderation'. But even this puts Paul on the side of common sense, rather than conveying his radicalism. When he suggests that circumcision is unimportant - proselytising for Christ among the gentiles is not about 'piling up foreskins' - it seems obvious, and the shocking nature of this break from Judaism is lost on us.

For all Brenton's open-minded sympathy for Paul, the 'good bit' of religion is rendered banal. Really, we are told, Christianity is just about beautiful stories, kindness and 'love'. This last was elaborated on by Paul in his letter to the Corinthians, which is dramatised in the play as a personal address, but the speech fails to electrify. It is certainly daring to present one of the best known and admired passages from scripture as a theatrical speech, but such daring needs to be backed up with real conviction, and this is simply missing. In keeping with his overall approach, Brenton uses the more conversational New Jersusalem Version rather than the poetic and mysterious King James Version ('through a glass darkly' and all that). But this makes it even harder for Rhys to convey much more than a basic sense of decency and compassion. What does that have to do with God, the virgin birth or the resurrection? What indeed?

Then there's this: 'When I was a child, I used to talk like a child, and see things as a child does, and think like a child; but now that I have become an adult, I have finished with all childish ways.' This is an attractive passage for atheists, because just as Paul saw Christianity as religion's coming of age, we like to think that in rejecting religion altogether, we 'put away childish things' (to use the King James Version). But that's the easy part. If 'humanism' is to thrive, it has to mean more than not believing in ghosts.

Among the many quotations about Paul printed in the programme, there is nothing from such ultra-hip contemporary philosophers as Slavoj Zizek or Alain Badiou. Brenton missed a trick there: despite Paul's traditional unpopularity on the left, the apostle is enjoying an unlikely afterlife in the writings of Marxian thinkers who are more conscious than their left-liberal counterparts of the intellectual frailty of contemporary secularism, and are attracted to Paul's ability to combine political nouse and determination with a sense of the transcendent. Such thinkers have difficulties of their own in secularising what they find appealing in Christianity, but at least they are aware there is a problem.

In ditching the miraculous, Brenton robs Paul's belief in the 'Kingdom of God' of its power to transform. What's missing is not magic, however, but passion - and it's not that the latter can't be secularised, just that it isn't here. What's really frustrating is that it's hardly unheard of for theatre to convey a sense of a world beyond, of the transcendent. When Paul persuades Peter to believe in the resurrection in spite of his first hand knowledge that it didn't happen, we can only look on in admiration: we are certainly not involved. Most of us have seen theatre that, if it doesn't make us believe in miracles, at least shows us that there is more to love than mutual respect and kindness. Paul fails to do that.

Richard Dillane's Nero, who appears towards the end of the play, is unmistakeably Satanic as he predicts Christianity's success in cool secular, even Marxist terms. But Brenton's secularism is anaesthetic: it is Marxism for philosophers, not revolutionaries. Paul counters Nero's devilish cynicism with blind faith: Brenton can't counter it at all.

Till 4 February 2006