Being invited behind the curtain by the directors to watch a full dress rehearsal must be a dream come true for anybody who has an enjoyment of the theatre. To watch from a corner of the room as the actors take in the words they have learned, to witness how comfortable they become as they are taken through their paces and their places, to see the wonder of theatre unfold before your eyes from almost the very start of the process is exhilarating and without doubt an honour.
The back room of the Casa is host to Burjesta Theatre for the day and for the their production of The Jesus Conspiracy…The Greatest Story Never Told, which will be showing on Friday 12th April, Saturday 13th, Monday 15th, Friday 19th and Saturday 20th April, the actors are being put through the warm-up routines by Mikyla Jane Durkan and Julian Bond and the excitement of watching the cast which includes Sarah Tyrer, Rachael Boothroyd, Alun Parry, Alex Solo, Mike Leane and Alan Bower doing vocal exercises in readiness for the next couple of hours work.
The Jesus Conspiracy…The greatest story never told is Scottish writer Peter Burton’s controversial take on Jesus the revolutionary, the man, the lover and the creation of the ‘fantasy of Christianity’ after his death by Paul. Spanning over a century of Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire, the stakes are high and brutality and massacre are common place.
With live musical accompaniment by ‘Greek-Blues’ guitarist Alex Solo, this show promises to be interesting and captivating.
I am at The Casa to talk to Julian and Mikyla about the play and the dress rehearsal has been an interesting experience, something to focus upon in what impresses upon me as a superb play in the making. With the actors having gone home, the clearing up for the evening put on hold for 20 minutes, I ask,
Having sat through your run-through and your second dress rehearsal, I’m very much struck by the whole play, mainly because I’ve never seen anything like it before with the whole idea of the story and the script. Was that a difficult one for you, to have put on; was it a conscious decision to do it?
Julian: “The history behind it was that it was written by Peter Burton who wrote it in 2006 and I happened to buy it and read it and I liked it message and its interpretation of history and for the fact that it was looking at indoctrination and propaganda and people fighting over history. I showed it to Mikyla and we talked about doing it for some time, we’ve eventually got round to doing it but we were attracted by the very reasons that you’re saying about it, that’s obviously what attracted us to it.”
Mikyla: “I think it’s just the whole story and the challenge of trying to bring that to a theatre space and a theatre audience and how to stage something that we haven’t written and we haven’t done a production that either Julian or I have written or devised so that was another attraction that we wanted to try and work on.”
The Pied Piper Of Liverpool was superb and I think audiences will hopefully get a lot out of this play. Obviously there are a few scenes which might be difficult for some parts of the audience to deal with but you haven’t blown them up in a particular way.
Julian: “We’ve been faithful to the script, Peter Burton has put into the script exactly what he wanted. I think you’re referring in part to the love-making scene between Jesus and Mary Magdalene and it makes perfect sense for it to go in, we talked about it with the actors and I don’t think either of the actors would have been happy to do it just for the sake of doing it because it’s quite vulnerable for them to do it. It will probably offend some people, the idea of Jesus making love with who is conventionally depicted as a fallen woman, a harlot but one of the things I like about what Peter Burton’s done, which is why we were attracted by it was trying to break the ties, end the monopoly. Christianity has the monopoly on Jesus and for me Jesus is a historical figure or possibly a composite of historical types and there’s argument over that in a way it’s as much my right to have an interpretation of Jesus as it is the Catholic or Protestant Churches and I think Peter Burton has quite rightly challenged them and he talks about the play in the publicity material and the book about the fantasy element and I think this comes from propaganda. I think the best you can say about the Gospels is that they are based on history but that they’ve been used in a certain fashion as a fantasy element.”
It is a propaganda issue really and I do love the fact that you’ve got Mary Magdalene’s story within that.
Mikyla: “I think that was one of the best things about it with me being a woman, it was the feminist angle of it. I think as well from a dramatic point of view if you like, crucifixion is horrific, which is a very obvious thing to say but unless you think about it on a basic level, it’s a horrific thing to do to a human being. It’s probably the most well-known story so I think from that point of view, that’s another reason because when you’re with somebody naked you are vulnerable then they are going to be ripped apart it’s horrible.”
Julian: “I think another thing is that something I’ve been thinking of if you look at conventional depictions of Jesus and the crucifixion whether it be on film or in the Mystery Plays people might see or in story-telling in general from a Christian perspective, his death is really prolonged torture and it’s shown a something joyous. The whole thing’s been inverted from something abominable into something wonderful in the sense that he died for our sins and all that kind of stuff and I’m really interested in and hopefully it’s covered by some extent in the play is that reality can be turned into its opposite and I think Peter Burton’s got that one sorted.”
There’s also vulnerability also with the bickering between James and John through this intense split and divide. The script is saying effectively that the Romans have won this because they’ve managed to split these four disciples to go different ways.
Julian: “Again interesting to me that you bring this up, because to tell you a little bit about the writer Peter Burton; he’s a Socialist and you can see parallels in the writing with lessons for the 21st Century Socialist movement within it. So it works as a play but it also has ramifications for anyone who’s politically educated can see that and it’s quite obvious that the parallels are there. It’s been done very purposefully, it was our choice, not significantly but we changed some words like Council and to make it more intense and there was the Poll Tax we thought it was too obvious, we thought people could work it out for themselves, not make it too obvious and instead of Counsel we changed it to Council, little details like that, a loose signposting.”
You say about the Council, I heard that word and my thoughts immediately turned to the Council of Nicaea, that’s where my mind took me, I know it’s about a 250 year gap basically but that’s immediately where my head was going too.
Julian: “We talked about that with the actors. None of us, neither the actors, myself or Mikyla pretend to be experts or are expected to be but we are all genuinely interested in getting it right and to check things and another example actually, I don’t know whether you picked up on it, there is a discussion about the Sicardi and how they bump off people and Jesus talks about you can’t have individual acts – that to me is pretty much, I’ve not spoken to Peter Burton on this but this seems like Marxism against Anarchism and I’m sure that Peter Burton’s put the Sicardi in as the villains.”
Mikyla: “That’s right, there are splits within splits and it’s not easy or straightforward to say it’s one way or the other. Life’s not like that, so I think that’s one of the good things that Peter Burton has done.”
I was very much interested the confrontation between Paul and James in the second act, it seemed incredibly physical.
Julian: “We’ve worked on the physicality of it, we’ve tried different things, we’ve looked at influences as far and wide as Kabuki Theatre because believe it or not, we saw some Kabuki Theatre a few months ago and were blown away by the stylisation of it and the movement that they use. It worked in some scenes but it didn’t work in others. We’ve tried to be imaginative because I think following on from the Greek idea that you don’t show things onstage, the stage directions from Peter Burton has them and the idea is that you try and make them not look crap or pathetic.”
Mikyla: “It’s lent itself really well to this play with crowd scenes and group scenes and also to bring the physicality to the play. A lot of the work is based on the idea of the Greek Chorus, looking the way that they do and also because to be able to include a lot of females in the cast because if you look at the actual speaking parts, which is historically representative, it was mainly male based but because we want to include women, as we try and have a 50/50 split between males and females in our theatre group, Peter Burton was aware that we’d brought in that element.”
Julian: “I know it wasn’t direct but I feel it’s had an influence, we’ve looked at and studied to some extent the Passion Plays, not from a Christian perspective, they are expansive and rich, you can see them in Coventry, Chester, York and elsewhere. They catch the eye spectacularly, even though we’re not in agreement ideologically.”
Mikyla: “It’s not a kind of attack on people who believe and we have spoken to quite a few different people, Christians, Methodists, believers but a lot of them have said it’s really interesting and glad in a way that you are covering that subject and I was telling Julian I was on the train and coming into town last week and there were two young guys 15 or 16, who you would expect to be chatting on about bands but they were having a conversation all the way to town about 25 on the Ten Commandments, the Bible and the relevancy of religion! I’m thinking am I imagining this because I’m doing this play? People are interested, not necessarily whether they believe or not but how things are used and how they are perceived, that’s why we were interested in the subject matter and I think it portrays Jesus as a strong, motivational character if you like, a champion of the people on Earth. We were being over-taxed, exploited, lots of parallels and showing Mary Magdalene as a strong, influential person.”
Julian: “There’s a scene actually that we’re working on, slightly re-jigging it, just before you arrived I think, which was the second scene after the interval, it’s the scene where Mary Magdalene basically removes herself from the rooms and walks off because she’s pregnant and we were laughing but there was a certain truth in it that the history of women is profoundly affected by her decision to move away as there could be a whole new way, history could have taken a different course. We were joking that it was all on Mary.”
Mikyla: “We wanted to show that it was her decision as well because she was pregnant and she left. We thought we’d take up this mantle but she’d probably would have been the leader certainly along with James but then she would have led and I think that as she’s chosen to go through circumstance but that’s quite key and it’s a good way to show it that it would not have been a case of get out you’re only a woman!”
Ian D. Hall