Theatre Review: The Nottingham Passion

There has been persistent rain through the day; by evening there is a light mist from a moody leaden sky. As my wife and I approach St Mary’s in the Lace Market, the queue stretches from the church, out along the street towards the Contemporary Art Gallery. There’s a cheerful hum of conversation and we find a group of friends in line snaking smoothly towards the door. We enter and sit whilst recorded monks’ voices reverberate around the church, opening the space into a kind of holy chasm.

The lights snap off one by one as the voices fade away. A machine bleeds smoke into the air; atmospheric music swells, and the area around the altar is lit with a dark acid blue. Warmer orange light pools around each pillar, before turning ice white. A combined company of male and female apostles make their way onto the stage, and the Passion begins with the opening words of John’s Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God….’ They stream forth between the audience, returning with palm leaves for Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem. 

Some key moments of Jesus’ life are touched in, before a Pharisee, challenging them from amongst the audience, foreshadows the coming anger and violence. James Pacey’s confident and supple adaptation artfully deploys sound and light to great effect: lighting runs between lilac, ice blue, and ice white, whilst dramatic scenes are interwoven with arch voice overs offering objective description and analysis of people and contexts contemporary to Biblical Israel.

The reasoning and fears of the Sanhedrin are handled in a balanced and fair way: these aren’t cartoonish stereotypes, but complex human beings nursing sincere concerns and comprehensible interests. 

Judas is presented as a frustrated, embittered zealot. His betrayal is more a rant against his own frustrations that God’s Kingdom isn’t coming any faster, the thirty pieces of silver merely a way to move on from his disappointment. Yet the moment in Gethsemane becomes a cliff edge. All too late, Judas sees that his frustrated resentment has blinded him to the reality of what he must now do. It’s a step that breaks him – and which Jesus must himself gently support him to complete. This is a thoughtful and thought-provoking handling of a spiritually and theologically fraught aspect of the Passion.

Pacey’s sensitive handling is just as assured in the depiction of the interplay between Pilate, Caiaphas and Annas. Pilate by his own standards is a decent and reasonable imperial governor: at first disinterested in a religious squabble amongst the natives, then attempting to knock responsibility back onto the Sanhedrin with lofty disdain, finally boxed into a corner and angrily acceding to their demands, snatching back a scrap of self-respect by washing his hands and contemptuously flicking water at the two priests, trying to shake the responsibility of Jesus’ death that he has just ordered onto their shoulders.

This Jesus is not ethereal, or heaven focused, but a flesh-and-blood man with Divine insights that prick and chafe him as much as they do those around him. He has come to show humanity that their salvation isn’t about to arrive in a miraculous burst of light, but rather to be truffled out in the stink and sweat and shadows of hard living, in the heavy laying aside of ego and desire. This Jesus feels genuine anguish at the prospect of pain and death but is urged inexorably on to his fate. The Garden of Gethsemane becomes a tortured turmoil of fear in the face of unavoidable horror. 

The battle after Jesus’ arrest is a deliberate slo-mo set piece, fully seated in its own physicality. The stage clears and Peter and Judas confront one another. For a moment, Peter raises the sword used moments before to sever a servant’s ear, but then turns away from his erstwhile friend in disgust.

The remaining followers are uncomprehending of Jesus’ acceptance of his fate, his refusal to fight for his own life. We see Caiaphas reasoning with him, offering the chance of survival as a kindness. As the players move up and down the church aisle, shadows are thrown high and far into the vaulted ceiling of the church, daubs of darkness as the story intensifies. Pilate pronounces sentence and the church is flooded blood-red. Jesus receives his cross – a weighty implement of torture, and we watch as he carries it foot by tortuous foot. Calm, clinical voices outline the appalling details of crucifixion and the Stations of the Cross.

After the Crucifixion, apple-green light of renewal shines across the rear of the church; the main door is thrown open and the stage is bathed in warm light as Jesus returns. Caiaphas and Annas join the company and complete the narration, somewhat offsetting any unwelcome undertones of anti-Semitism.

Pacey’s company of players all deserve credit for spirited and committed performances that bring a touch of lemon sharpness and freshness to the play. If anything, the roles of Mary and Mary Magdalene could have been expanded a little, to allow these compelling female stories to breathe just a little bit more.

The lights come up and we make our way out of the church. The rain has knocked some petals from the magnolia tree in the churchyard, but it still stands resplendent in the twilight. Lights are strung through the branches of another tree. The hubbub of a Friday evening in Nottingham pulses away within and behind the beautiful buildings of the Lace Market. We make our way back towards normal life, with a little of the Passion’s grit under our fingernails.