HOWARD BRENTON is one of those interesting unbelievers — John Mortimer is the noblest of the genre — in whom a fascination with religion combines with a strong sense of justice.
The title character in his play Paul might have been tricked on the road to Damascus by a Jesus who did not die on the cross, but the play as a whole was not just another contribution to the Dan Brown school of cheesy scholarship. For Brenton, Paul was a “moral genius” whose faith was so powerful it made everyone else seem second-rate.
Nor is the Brenton take on the story of Abélard and Heloïse in In Extremis flip or prurient or sentimental or cheesy. True, there are some shallow, silly moments, and more than a few that will leave serious historians chewing at their parchments in dismay, but Brenton sees Peter Abélard, in particular, as much more than a maverick priest who traded his testicles for love. Rather, he is a brilliant thinker and neo-Aristotelian dialectician who tried to reconcile a new humanism with a genuine belief in God.
Sadly, Brenton runs up against the old problem of chronicle drama. He does not always find a modern idiom that adequately substitutes 12th-century speech, which means there are lines that plonk rather than zing, such as this description of Abélard: “He is heretical but the greatest scholar alive.” However, the tale of mutual love between a priest and his pupil, their differing struggles and, as it turns out, rather similar fates — Abélard the respected if still-controversial monk and teacher, Heloïse the admired if heartbroken teacher and abbess — is undeniably gripping.
Mainly, the play sticks to the facts, but it does take liberties, primarily with Abélard’s great enemy, St Bernard of Clairvaux. As played by an intense, skeletal Jack Laskey, St Bernard is no longer a mystic but a devious politician who is not at all beneath using spiritualist-style trickery to advance the mindless fundamentalism that he feels is threatened by Abélard’s crusade for logic and reason. That is a travesty of the man and it comes with the curious suggestion that Aristotle was anathema to the Church rather than what he was and is — a pillar of its teaching from well before St Thomas Aquinas until well after the Penny Catechism.
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John Dove’s production bangs along at a quick pace and is well enough acted, although Sally Bretton has yet to find a way of embodying Heloïse’s intellectual gravity as well as her eager eroticism. To be blunt, she becomes a bit Hello! magazine at times. Oliver Boot, however, confirms the strong impression he made as Pompey in the Globe’s Antony and Cleopatra. He is energetic, charismatic, mentally restless, passionate and as offhandedly vain as Abélard undoubtedly was.
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