Plays 3 - Steven Berkoff

 Steven Berkoff entered the theatre about the same time I began training for it.   He has therefore always figured in my theatrical consciousness, though I have never seen his work and, for some reason, none of it has joined my vast collection of plays - until I picked this up earlier in the week.

The collection here is of his minor work, two of which have never been performed (though there has been an acted-out reading of The Messiah).   That does not mean they are neglible.   All three appeal to me largely because they happen to be subjects which I have researched: the blood libel of Jews in medieval England, Jesus the man, and the Oedipus myth.

Ritual in Blood is the fully realised play, given at Nottingham Playhouse in 2001.   I wish I had been involved with theatre at that time - I would have loved to see it.   The piece is ambitious, dozens of characters coming and going, and Berkoff and I come to same conclusion: it's all, always, about money.  The Messiah naturally deploys similar devices - Berkoff famously developed idiosyncratic, highly personal forms of acting and writing.   I feel sure he would have reworked some elements of this text had it gone on to be fully staged.   I have considered the same twist or explanation for the miracle but did not find it entirely satisfactory here.

Oedipus I thought was excellent.   Firstly we are not dealing with the same level of reality here.   It has always been a myth and Berkoff's style is brilliantly 'mythic'.   Like Sophocles, he makes the action continuous - one unbelievably awful episode - and breezily ignores or overrides the obvious problems involved.   Indeed, it is the pace which gives the piece its power.   I especially enjoyed his device for a couple of necessary flashbacks: instead of dull narration, characters act out the incidents as if they were there, witnesses to things happening now, before their eyes.

Fascinating and intriguing.

Behold the Man - Michael Moorcock

Moorcock is the king of modern British sci fi. He has been writing at a stupendous rate for more than fifty years and there are more than a hundred books. This, from the late Sixties and Moorcock's late twenties, is one of very few stand alone works. A version - a novella version - of Behold the Man won the Nebula award (best novella 1967). The thing about Moorcock is, he constantly reworks, rewrites and expands. There are multiple versions of various stories, just as there are multiple universes in some of his fiction.

This, it might be said, is Moorcock's distinctive take on H G Wells' The Time Machine. Wells, being Wells, was only really interested in the future. The time machine here, we are told as soon as our hero sees it, cannot go forward, only back. And if we can only go back - subject to the usual caveat of not  changing history - where would most of us choose to go? Elizabethan England perhaps? The age of the dinosaurs? The Holy Land circa 30AD? As might be guessed from the title, our hero Karl Glogauer opts for the latter.

His life in Sixties London, which is recreated throughout the novel, has led him to question his religious beliefs. So when the physicist Sir James Headington shows him his time machine and invites him to use it, Karl has only one destination in mind.

Virtually the first person he encounters in Roman Palestine is John the Baptist. Fortunately Glogauer has taught himself Aramaic, unfortunately John doesn't seem to have heard of his supposed cousin, Jesus of Nazareth. Yet the time is right - 28AD. Jesus should be mustering disciples and spreading the Word. His ministry won't last long and, critically, John has to die first.

Thus begins Karl's quest for the as yet unknown Nazarene. I won't reveal how it pans out but will just state that it does so in a highly satisfactory manner.

This is the first full-length Moorcock I have tackled. I was put off about the time he was writing the original version of Behold the Man, by a ridiculous piece of fluff he wrote for an alternative magazine of Swinging London. I enjoyed this hugely. I loved the nonstop tide of ideas, the clever way he play with the various levels of narrative and the distinctive tone he gives to each.  Glogauer is an amiable hero, not quite an everyman, more an everyday avatar of the polymathic Moorcock. I have already ordered another Moorcock - one which isn't listed among the hundred or so in this series from Gollancz but which Moorcock himself mentions in his introduction - called Mother London. I am definitely keen to read his take on Elizabeth I, Gloriana, though I am slightly worried that has something to do with the off-putting bilge I read on the train home from London circa 1968-9. We'll see.

The Testament of Mary - Colm Toibin

I remember when this novella came out in 2012. There was a lot of fuss, mentions of transgression.  Turns out it's not transgressive at all and rattles no more cages than Toibin's supremely bland Brooklyn which came out around the same time.

This is not to say it's badly written.  It's not. Nor is it illuminating, moving or - I'm afraid to say - particularly interesting.  The Jesus who appears here is the official one, the one who works miracles, who speaks in Thee's and Thou's, and who is obsessed with his mission.  The disciples, unnamed, who pop up from time and time, are slightly more interesting, after the crucifixion squabbling about what is the official version and who gets to write it, at the crucifixion itself notable by their patently craven absence.  Indeed, it was this explicit suggestion by Toibin, through Mary, that I found the most interesting aspect of the book.

Mary herself is sadly not especially interesting.  Her role seems to have been the Gospel one - she gave birth to Jesus, nursed him through infancy, and tben lost touch or was cast off.  The title is accurate; this is Mary's account of what she saw of her son's ministry and death - the account the Gospel writers prefer to ignore because it tends to diminish them.  The structure, switching between Mary's declining present and the dangerous past in which her son is captured and crucified, works well.  Toibin doesn't shy away from the other Marys of the traditional narrative and focuses on Mary, the sister of Miriam and Lazarus.  This Mary accompanies our Mary to Golgotha. She also links in Lazarus, raised from the dead after four days - we are left in doubt that he was really dead and returned - but not to full life.  He cannot eat or drink, just moans and groans, evidently in mental and physical pain.  The present Mary is also facing up to death.  The question is suggested: Will she be restored to eternal life as the gospellers would have her believe, or the sort of quasi-life that Lazarus endured?

Perhaps Toibin would have done better to explore the Lazarus story.  He didn't and must be judged on what he did write.  As I say, the writing is masterly.  There are subtle questions and suggestions here.  Overall, though, I found it hard to care about this Mary whose only purpose in life seems to have been to act as a divine birthing pod and, for a brief few weeks, mute witness to an appalling death.