The Faith Machine had its first night at the Royal Court last night. It went down well.
The story features that rare creature, a bishop who was broken by the 1998 Lambeth conference, the ‘anti-gay one’ that Peter Selby likened to a Nuremberg rally. Bishop Edward has some of the best lines too. ‘Nihilism is the victory of the status quo,’ was one I chewed over on the way home.
Congratulations as well to Alexi Kaye Campbell who deftly finds a relatively fresh response to the arguments of atheism. ‘Fools, fools, fools’, Edward says, for trying to understand ‘the soul of the world’ without myth and poetry. ‘The militant atheist saying, “Don’t think like that, don’t dream like that, don’t wish like that, don’t breathe like that.”‘
Thinking, dreaming, wishing, breathing like that is traumatically demonstrated when Edward loses his mind to dementia. All he can remember are lines from the Bible. I’ve heard carers report the same thing. The person would say nothing all day long and then recite the Magnificat or the Lord’s Prayer in perfect King James English. The lines are not remembered in their minds, which have gone, but are written on their souls. They can still think and dream a little.
The story of the play revolves around Edward’s daughter, Sophie, and her off and on boyfriend, Tom. She is all soul, becoming a journalist so as to devote her life to reporting personal stories of war and exploitation. He had soul in his youth, manifest in an unpublished novel, though then he sold his soul to the highest bidder – becoming an amoral, highly paid advertising account manager.
That’s a bit of an easy dig, though it got good laughs. It fascinated me as well that the Royal Court wanted a play that spent quite some time discussing the arguments of the Anglican communion.
But the message? On the face of it, that is obvious: Tom loses his soul. The word is used against him several times. However, I was surprised when, in the final scene, one of the characters says this line: ‘For what good shall it profit a man shall he gain the whole world?’
It’s another Biblical quote, and garbled, and at first I thought the actor must have got it wrong. But Alexi must have meant it that way: I checked the script.
The original poetry runs, ‘For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’ So I took the message actually to be more subtle. We’re in danger of losing the line about losing our soul, and we hardly even know now that it can go.