Plays Murder in the Cathedral

At Emmanuel Church through April 1

THERE are many ways of filling up the days here. We have our classes, our loneliness, our complaints, we have our friends and lovers. We worry, sometimes, about these things, we worry most of the time about ourselves. We know, and do not know, we try to change, we remain uncertain. But despite the uncertainty and the ambiguity of our lives, or perhaps because of them, we dream. We call the new dreams the future, and they give us a place to go when the getting there is too much to handle. We call the old dreams memories, and they make the past an easy time to remember, and to escape to. With dreams, the days, and the filling of days, seem only temporary: they let us believe that someday, there will be a reason for what we do, some way in which what we do, and what we want to do will become the same. It is good to have these dreams. "Human kind cannot bear very much reality."

Murder in the Cathedral is a play about a man who is given the chance to realize his dreams, to make the idea and the reality one. Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, had renounced political power and the friendship of the king when he had been appointed leader of the Church of England. His position gave him influential leverage in the politics of the era and weighted his every action toward the direction of history. Eliot's play opens with Becket's return to England after a seven-year exile in France and closes with his murder at the hands of the King's soldiers. It is the study of a man who has the choice of deciding his own fate, or submitting himself to the will of the inevitable, the will of his God. His torment lies in the fact that either choice will result in the same outcome-a martyr's death. Becket finds such a death to be the ultimate path to his long-held desires for power and glory; humble submission to the will of God demands the same sacrifice. Salvation or damnation will in the end be determined by whether or not he accepts his fate, or decides it. He knows, and does not know, that "The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason."

T. S. ELIOT'S highly stylized and rigidly structured form of drama seems at first a curious medium in which to express the madness and torment of Becket's struggle with his fate. What the audience sees is not so much the performance of a play, as the enactment of a ritual. The characters speeches are set in poetry: there is the barest outline of a plot. It is up to the director and the actors themselves to endow this ritual with all the intensity and the passion of the themes it seeks to express. Director David Wheeler and the Theatre Company of Boston succeed in doing this beautifully.

One of the largest problems in staging Murder in the Cathedral is what to do with the actors while they go about the business of hitting the audience with line after line of great poetry. Very little action is called for in the play itself, and its potential impact could very easily be lost in a welter of words. What Mr. Wheeler has done is use the movements of the actors throughout the course of the play as another means of expressing the many subconscious elements implicit in the characters' speeches. The actors make full use of the beautiful chapel in which the play is performed, often putting the audience in the middle of a scene.

The acting itself was uniformly good. William Young, as Thomas Becket, turned in a performance that was for the most part sensitive to the ambiguities and contradictions of his character's personality. We see clearly Becket's greatness; at the same time we are permitted a glimpse into his madness. The four women of Canterbury play their roles with a vitality that does much to enhance the importance of their function within the play; unfortunately, however, the energy with which they weep and gnash their teeth sometimes has a way of obscuring the beauty of their lines.

The director and cast of Murder in the Cathedral have done a very graceful job of bringing to life an incredibly intricate and complex play, without destroying the subtlety of its poetry. See the play, but before you go, it would be a good idea to read it through. The words will mean more to you then, and you will be able to better appreciate the richness of expression that this production brings to them.