Iona Firouzabadi
posted 16 October 2006

Love will tear us apart, again? Like Romeo and Juliet, the story of Abelard and Heloise is an archetype of lovers put asunder. In a vibrant, modern retelling of their affair, Howard Brenton makes the Dark Ages resonate with more current affairs.

It is the twelfth century and Louis VI is on the throne of France. Heloise (Sally Bretton) is a teenager when she first meets the controversial Peter Abelard (Oliver Boot), twenty years her senior. An orphan with an acute and enquiring mind, Heloise becomes his student and lover. When she chooses to bear his child out of wedlock, their affair becomes the scandal of the age. Abelard is a radical theologian - preoccupied by individualism and reason hundreds of years before the Renaissance and the Enlightenment make such ideas intellectual currency. He threatens the 'mindlessly fanatical' Christianity of his time. While Abelard believes that Aristotelian logic can be used to understand the writings and creations of God, he finds his antithesis in the Cistercian Abbot, Bernard of Clairvaux (Jack Laskey). Like a royal marriage, Ihas three protagonists. Bernard is an ascetic mystic and religious fundamentalist, leader of a monastic brotherhood who scourge and deny the flesh.

By way of these three characters time is telescoped and our era seems to be sitting alongside their debates - can individualism and rationalism triumph in an age of religious extremism? But like the debates between Abelard and Heloise, the play engages in dialectic and synthesis, ergo there is not a simple opposition between the rational and the religious. In the final discourse between Abelard and Bernard, their roles are tacitly reversed - Abelard a silent Christ figure, Bernard a questioning Pilate. Abelard and Heloise are very far from being secular; they are both spiritual and worldly, just as they are equally of the intellect and of the body. In consequence Christianity, the signifier for religion, is not the devil of the piece, but rather an ideology in flux, open to reinterpretation and appropriation. These dark ages are not shrouded in night, but are struggling for a new dawn.

While the most fired and engaging scenes in In Extremis are those of dialectical argument, this is not a play that operates only on the level of abstract theology. While Heloise describes herself and Abelard as 'philosophical warriors', fighting in a war of ideas, the metaphor is a robustly physical one and the wounds of this war will be physical too. It is Abelard's abduction, and violent castration at the hands of Heloise's uncle that result in him taking monastic orders. As Heloise says to Abelard of love: 'we are not going to read, we are going to do'.

Brenton's medievalism is irreverent. Intellectual commentary is happily spliced with comedy and occasionally visited by the ghost of a Monty Python script; one character deriding another with the throwaway line, 'we live in a mythic age'. This kind of self-aware humour plays perfectly on the Globe stage. You even get a hilarious trio of nuns.

The vibrancy of the writing is underlined by Disney-esque casting: we have a beautiful blonde heroine and a dark, handsome and hirsute hero, about twice her size. This is a constant visual reminder that on one level we are watching an archetype of doomed love. While Sally Bretton's performance is a little too lightweight and girly to convince, the text still sounds strongly enough through her to make Heloise more than simply an adjunct to Abelard. In contrast to the lovers, Jack Laskey's Bernard is a scarecrow in a habit, a compelling and even likeable anti-hero, both manic and fragile. John Dove's direction is also strongly visual - the debate during which Abelard and Heloise first meet resembles a loose enactment of Raphael's School of Athens. The production like the play is not afraid to be serious but doesn't take itself too seriously.

Run over