I have heard it now twice over—from two independent producers of two separate plays—the exact same warning in almost identical words:

“Well now, ladies and gentlemen, I think there’s only one thing I have to say before we start reading through. Although this is a play about—er—angels and God and Christ and so on, you don’t want to go extra slow, or put on a special tone of voice or anything. Just treat it as you would an ordinary play. Speak the lines quite naturally and play it straight.”

The company nod intelligently, and their drooping spirits revive. They had come prepared to be religious in the usual manner, but if the producer thinks that religion should be “played straight” they are delighted to adapt their ideas to his. Actors are biddable creatures.

The significant thing is that both producers should have taken it for granted, without any prompting from the author of the play, that the warning was urgently necessary. At the name of Jesus, every voice goes plummy, every gesture becomes pontifical, and a fearful creeping paralysis slows down the pace of the dialogue. “So I thought,” says the producer, “I’d better jump on that idea from the word go, because I knew if they once got it into their heads they’d never get rid of it.”

Most of us never do get rid of it. The Bible is appointed to be read in churches, where the voice struggles helplessly against the handicaps of an Elizabethan vocabulary, a solemn occasion, an overpowering background, a mute assembly, and acoustics with a two-second echo. The more “beautifully and impressively” it is read, the more unreal it sounds. Most unreal of all is the speech of the story’s central character—every word a “familiar quotation,” pulpit-dissected, sifted, weighed, burdened with a heavy accretion of prophetic and exegetical importance. In a sense not contemplated by the Evangelist, we feel it to be true that never man spake as this man, for by this time the words have lost all likeness to the speech of a living person.

A stern edict of the Censor—probably a very wise one—prohibits the representation on the English stage of the actual person of Christ. This adds to the Apollinarian unreality of New Testament plays. The Humanity is never really there—it is always just coming on, or just going off, or being a light or a shadow or a voice in the wings. If our modern theatre had anything like the freedom of Oberammergau or the medieval stage, I believe one could find no better road to a realistic theology than that of coaching an intelligent actor to play the Leading Part in the world’s drama. Nothing so surely probes the inner coherence and vitality of a dramatic “character” as the gruelling test of production. All the puzzles and contrasts which we scarcely notice in a series of readings spread over from day to day are now going to be crammed together into a swift Aristotelian unity, and made visible. If its reality will stand up to that, it will stand up to anything.

The static, the over-simplified will have to go; we shall be forced to make the “bridge” between “gentle Jesus” and the wrath of the Lamb; we shall no longer be able to keep the Godhead and the Manhood in watertight compartments, since the same actor will have to deal with both of them and make the blend convincing.

“Look,” we shall find ourselves saying to him, “if you play the first scene in that stained-glass way, there’ll be an awful jerk when you have to do a quick come-back on hecklers, and insult the Pharisees, and man-handle the traders out of the Temple. You’ll have to plant all those possibilities in the character from the start. You want to be tremendously mobile, never the same from one minute to the next, with a terrific reserve of fire and energy under the crust, so to speak. After all, people wouldn’t follow you all round the place if you weren’t extraordinarily—what’s the word?—vital—dynamic—that sort of thing. . . .”

“Couldn’t you make a little more out of that last line—‘the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them ’? It’s ironical, isn’t it, leading up to that as the biggest miracle of all—but unless you point it for them these lads won’t notice it and will forget to tell John. They’re standing there, all pop-eyed over the signs and wonders, and you’ve got to put it across to them. . . . No, not too sharply—with just a bit of a twinkle, perhaps . . . and you disciples, you’ve got to play to that—it’s a new idea to you. . . . Right. . . . Now then, disciples off, and you go on and let the crowd have it . . . bird-witted, frivolous, gaping at celebrities, never knowing what they want . . . working up to the big denunciations. And then it all sort of flares away, and you get the meek and lowly side uppermost—if only people will be spontaneous and sincere. . . . Yes, of course, it is most frightfully close-packed. . . .”

“That bit about the gnat and the camel is a joke —and, crowd, do try to look as if you hadn’t heard it fifty thousand times over on Sundays . . . act it for them, dear—fussily filtering out the gnat, and then gulping down that awful great lolloping brute all hair and humps. . . . We want a good guffaw, please, from the stout citizen and a titter from the women . . . the Lawyer mustn’t laugh—he probably thinks it dreadfully vulgar, just the sort of thing you would expect from a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber. . . .”

“Oh, yes, I think you’re genuinely disappointed about the rich young ruler. . . . I don’t think you know everything beforehand in that detailed sort of way—not with your human mind; it would make the whole thing very unreal if you did. . . . Yes, you have a human mind—the Athanasian Creed says so distinctly: ‘altogether man, with a rational mind and human body’—so play it quite naturally. . . .”

(Of course, the minute you take Christ as somebody really real, you’re landed in theology—but you can’t produce acting by arguing about kenosis or the monophysite heresy. You’ve got to translate the thing into terms of life and action—what would the double nature feel like, look like? You can’t just say it’s a mystery and leave it at that; the real Jesus didn’t look like a walking conundrum—He looked like a person.)

“Well, yes, I suppose you do know you’re God all the time, but surely not in that rigid, theological sense. I should think it would be more like the way a man knows deep down inside him that he really is a genius. It’s the unspoken assumption on which he habitually acts, but it isn’t perpetually present to his conscious thought. It’s only when something challenges his claim to be true to that interior reality that the knowledge comes surging up to the surface, and he says, with that absolute sense of conviction, I am . . .”

All very inadequate, of course, but any approach, however small, to a sense of reality would surely be better than no approach at all. We have learnt recently, with agitation and astonishment, that there are many children in this Christian country to whom the whole Christ-story is completely unknown. How, one wonders, is it being presented to these untutored minds? Do they find it interesting? Do they think it exciting? They at least are not stupefied with preconceptions—are we offering it to them as a dramatic reality? or shall we merely succeed in making each of them as stereotyped and dull as ourselves? It is so very difficult to recognise opportunity when it comes in the guise of disaster; but if we are going to offend these little ones by the contamination of our own unimaginative lethargy, it would be better that a millstone were hanged about our necks, and that we were cast into the sea. Are we so shocked at ignorance? There are times when ignorance is a welcome bliss;—what would it be like to go and see Hamlet with a perfectly virgin mind?

( Note. —Since this was written, the B.B.C. has given me the opportunity of trying the experiment suggested in the text. The reception given to The Man Born to be King showed, I think, that the public thought it well worth trying.)