Written on the Heart review, Duchess Theatre

Lost in translation

Written on the Heart is a cleverly written and beautifully performed tour through the vagaries of royalty, loyalty and God. It is the story of the Authorised - King James - Bible, a translation that took fifty two of the UK's brightest scholars to get right, and which even as the ink dried was the cause of concern and consternation.

David Edgar's script explores the art of word play through the eyes of the clergy serving the courts of Henry VIII and Bloody Mary, Elizabeth I and King James. As the royal houses vacillated between Protestanism, Papism and Puritanism, so the protocols and politics of Christianity were redrawn. Each period is beautifully reflected in the set - a commanding structure of arches and windows that morph into churches, church houses and prisons. As the cast swish around in cassocks through the ages, Gregory Doran's production is like a series of still life paintings.

Oliver Ford Davies is ever gracious as the Bishop of Ely, battling a tortured past to oversee a  translation of the Bible that meets the strictures of the Reformation and can work for future generations. Stephen Boxer as William Tyndale - imprisoned and killed for his 'ploughman's' version of the Bible - provides elegant perorations about the original Hebrew, and returns in ghostly form to question Ely's choice of words 80 years later. It's wily and witty but if you don't have a grounding in Christianity or the Bible, it will not make much sense.

In Conclusion: Written on the Heart is a play about the power of language: how the smallest tweak can wreak massive changes in the reader's perception. The concept is electric, but the content limits its value to those of theological bent.

References
Tickets
Quentin Letts review in The Daily Mail