GUARDIAN
4 Stars
Reviewed by Michael Billington, Wednesday 21 July 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/jul/21/light-shining-in-buckinghamshire-review
Caryl Churchill's remarkable 1976 play is too little known. Seizing on the millennial movements that erupted during the English civil war in the 1640s, it depicts the eternal battle between revolutionary idealism and political pragmatism. As Polly Findlay's revival reminds us, in its shift to modern dress, the play also deals with issues that still burn brightly today.
In a series of short, elliptical scenes, Churchill demonstrates the fervour, much of it religious, that animated the 17th-century unrest. The king is equated with the antichrist. Parliament's mission is to build the new Jerusalem. The belief in equality is sanctioned by biblical texts.
But the great moment in Churchill's play comes when she anticipates verbatim theatre by offering an edited version of the Putney Debates of 1647. The radical Levellers, spearheaded by Colonel Rainsborough, argue for liberty and universal suffrage; the military establishment, led by General Ireton, stands for security and property as the basis for electoral eligibility. It is a pivotal moment in English history and one which Cromwell, having expressed his sympathy for Ireton, swiftly resolves by saying: "I move for a committee."
Played out on four rectangular spaces formed by an embedded crucifix, Findlay's production captures the restless volatility of the period: even the Utopian Ranters, who believe that God resides in each individual, and who exude a merry anarchy, are countered by a former agitator who foresees an England in which the poor remain permanently oppressed. The six-strong cast, including Michelle Terry, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith and Jamie Ballard, switch roles with skill and prosecute the rival arguments with ferocious zeal. Churchill's play emerges as a highly topical piece of living history, as vacuous arguments about the Big Society are used to camouflage the reinforcement of economic injustice.
THE TIMES
4 Stars
Reviewed by Jeremy Kingston, Thursday 22 July 2010
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/stage/theatre/article2653682.ece
Three years ago Polly Findlay won the JMK Award with her production of Romeo and Juliet. I well remember how the actress playing Juliet spat fury at the dire workings of Fate. The young idealists in Findlay’s revival of Caryl Churchill’s English Revolution play likewise spit fury as they come to understand their betrayal by Oliver Cromwell and his grandees. The Levellers, Diggers and other radicals have argued that the workers should have a say in how they are governed, but they are opposed, defeated and mostly executed. The victors guess that their inherited right to own land will be threatened and this cannot be allowed.
Despite the constant references that the characters make to God, Jesus, Heaven and Hell, it frequently darts into being sharply contemporary in its arguments on liberty and order. To emphasise this aspect Findlay, in the second half, introduces changes in the costumes so that they are no longer strictly 17th century but include modern scarves and ties and, for the rowdily despairing scene that closes the play, the characters sit drinking from beer bottles. The red labels provide the only dashes of colour where everything else, like the issues that allow no compromise, is black or white.
The cast of six take on many roles as the play moves from the early scenes showing a society riven by religious guilt, poverty and the arrogance of wealth. When a woman (Michelle Terry) argues against predestination she is angrily told that women cannot preach and is set upon by the men. The beating aside, this argument still hasn’t ended, though cannot has been replaced by shall not.
Strongly acted throughout, with lovely riffs on seemingly dry subjects such as the line in Revelation that there shall be no more sea, the climax for me came with the casting out from a tormented woman (Helena Lymbrey) not of a devil, but the belief that a devil is within her. An absorbing evening.
METRO
4 Stars
Reviewed by Robert Shore, Wednesday 21 July 2010
http://e-edition.metro.co.uk/2010/07/21/
When deputy prime minister Nick Clegg recently announced a constitutional shake-up the like of which this country hasn’t seen since 1832’s Great Reform Act, what he was proposing was nothing compared to the reforms debated in St Mary’s Church in Putney in 1647.
That was when Oliver Cromwell met representatives of the New Model Army and the proto-socialist Levellers to discuss the nation’s political future now that the absolutist king, Charles I, had been brought to book by parliament. Should the vote be extended to everyone? What form should elections take? And even - with pre-echoes of Marxist logic - should property be abolished and the existing social contract be ripped up?
Caryl Churchill’s 1976 play, the first to grow out of her highly productive collaboration with director Max Stafford-Clark (Cloud Nine and Serious Money would follow), brilliantly ventriloquises the idealistic humble voices in English history, when the Second Coming was imminently expected and Heaven on Earth seemed briefly attainable. It’s not an easy watch: the nature of the ensemble playing means it’s difficult to identify with particular characters. But, as Stafford-Clark noted when it was first performed, the play has ‘a clean, spare beauty and passion in it’, and Poly Findlay’s brilliantly acted, tenebristic revival, performed in a stark enveloping gloom illuminated with sudden shafts of light, beautifully captures the piece’s emotional arc of disillusionment and the wild uplift of the final sequence.
WHATSONSTAGE.COM
4 Stars
Reviewed by Honour Bayes, Tuesday 21 July 2010
http://www.whatsonstage.com/reviews/theatre/london/E8831279644667/Light+Shining+In+Buckinghamshire.html
In his book State Of The Nation: British Theatre since 1945, Michael Billington mentions a number of plays which, whilst seminal at the time, have not as he gracefully puts it ‘aged well’.
He posits Caryl Churchill’s 1976 play Light Shining In Buckinghamshire as one of the few exceptions to this rule; so why then is it so under produced? Perhaps to right this wrong The Arcola is housing Polly Findlay’s sturdy yet impassioned production that more than highlights the timelessness of Churchill’s text.
Set in Putney in 1647, Light Shining In Buckinghamshire takes a comprehensive look at the debates and tussles for power within the Puritan New Model Army. The ‘Grandees’ Oliver Cromwell and his right hand man Henry Ireton are at logger heads with the Agitators and Levellers, ordinary officers representing their regiments.
The revelation that nothing is to change for the poor is being brought home with devastating force to the Agitators. Their liberal and (even in this day and age), forward thinking Agreement of the People is refused at every turn as the ‘Silken Independents’, worthily represented by Ireton, refuse to acquiesce to the idea that all men are equal, fearing that to do so would attack the very foundations of a landowner’s right to hold property.
It is not only the political infighting and squabbling that rings so true in today’s coalition landscape, but also Cromwell’s betrayal of the ideologies he held whilst in opposition. This is something that any modern voter will painfully recognise.
Churchill avoids allowing the text to become nothing more than dry intellectual debate by tempering the theory with a rising amount of emotional and religious fervour. Whilst societal revolution is imploding, a religious revelation shines through as a hippy mania of free love and reclaiming sin grips the increasingly maligned Agitators.
Findlay brings out the desperation of the ordinary men and women at play here with a painfully acute flair and her staging fully encompasses the audience as members of these community meetings.
Performed with a full-blooded zeal by a stellar cast, including Kobna Holdbrook Smith and Michelle Terry, at moments this production is truly hypnotic; Helen Lymbery’s final ecstatic seduction into religious escapism is an almost Bacchic conversion and one we all feel whipped up in. After all their effort, we are left watching people scrabbling for a saviour; soaked in the sombre realisation that these moments of revolutionary potential, whether they be in 1647, 1997 or 2010, invariably come to nothing.
THE STAGE
Reviewed by Natasha Tripney, Tuesday 20 July 2010
http://thestage.co.uk/reviews/review.php/28973/light-shining-in-buckinghamshire
For the Arcola’s revival of Caryl Churchill’s stirring play, a ditch in the form of a cross of earth dominates the room, an apt symbol in more ways than one as land and its ownership are central in this hymn to British radicalism.
Although Churchill’s play focuses on the Putney Debates of 1647, it has a much longer reach and the social ideals discussed feel just as potent today. Churchill contextualises the debates by depicting the harsh life of the poor, babies dying for want of food, women stripped and lashed for vagrancy. The play concludes with a second debate, this time set in an alehouse where the hungry and disposed congregate, claiming to glimpse God in even the darkest corners of their world.
The language is typically rich and Polly Findlay’s direction is extremely evocative - occasional shifts to modern dress highlight the universality of the themes without being too heavy-handed about it. The rapid switching between characters means the piece can be hard to follow, but there’s some strong ensemble acting at work and the production rewards the audience’s efforts. It’s full of striking sequences, from Kobna Holdbrook Smith in a gleaming black butcher’s apron refusing meat to the wealthy and well-fed, to the uplift of the final scene, the sense of connection forged round a table littered with beer bottles.
FINANCIAL TIMES
3 Stars
Reviewed by Ian Shuttleworth, Monday 19 July 2010
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/2c31747c-934c-11df-bb9a-00144feab49a.html
Caryl Churchill’s 1976 dramatic collage-portrait of the Levellers, Diggers, Ranters and other millenarian radicals of the English Civil war period implicitly suggests parallels with its own time, as does any revival. For instance, the account of the 1647 Putney Debates between disparate elements in Cromwell’s New Model Army may today elicit observations about the difficulties of coalition government. But this scene illustrates much more, such as the frequency with which reforms proposed in opposition are jettisoned in government, and the hyperbolical argument that equates changing one thing with overturning the entire established order (as Henry Ireton argued that abolishing the property qualification on voting would in effect abolish the concept of property).
Churchill shows us an age of almost unbelievable fluidity in the social order: thousands believed that the second coming of Christ was at hand and that it was their pressing duty to bring about the kingdom of heaven on earth. In particular, many Ranters shared the notions of the earlier Brethren of the Free Spirit, that since God was in all things then they, being themselves divine, could not sin. This is shown in the play’s other lengthy scene, although director Polly Findlay makes it almost as much of a debate as Putney, with little sense of the dynamism of such beliefs.
Each of the six performers plays a variety of roles, not limited by sex: Michelle Terry and Helena Lymbery each excel in the Putney sequence, as Ireton and one of the Leveller agitators respectively. Jamie Ballard also brings a conviction and intensity to his range of characters. (One pedantic point: the hypercorrection of voicing the “i” in “parliament” is annoying at the best of times, but more so when the person mispronouncing it is supposed to be parliament’s champion, Oliver Cromwell: a rare lapse in excellence for Kobna Holdbrook-Smith.) In the end, the play reminds us sombrely that such moments of potential pass: they either come to nothing in the first place, or the old order is soon restored. As Pete Townshend put it in a later episode of comparable apparent flux: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
MUSICOMH.COM
4 Stars
Reviewed by Daniel B. Yates, Wednesday 21 July 2010
http://www.musicomh.com/theatre/lon_light-shining_0710.htm
For many of us British history sweeps by in gilded robes. Flick on the history channel, and between the programmes on Nazi gold and Top 10 Mermaids of All Time, you are bound to find someone tiredly picking over the corpus of British monarchy.
Indeed sometimes it seems we have made the transition from forelock-tugging subject, to plonker-pulling celebrity watcher, by patiently observing an unending procession of sovereign glamour. That our constitutional monarchy long since descended into soap opera is widely acknowledged, that this thin media gruel stretches back to the dark ages, less so.
Caryl Churchill's neglected classic is a sizzling antidote to every television historian you've ever fallen asleep watching. It revolves around the incendiary events of 1647. Oliver Cromwell and his Grandees were poised to capture the sovereign power of England, in their way stood the strident and disaffected Levellers. Through the infamous Putney debates they would decide the radical cast of Britain's future.
Churchill's mixture of living drama and historical precision is deep and compelling. The debates themselves are eloquently summarised in a formal contest of ideas, teased from the dense grove of political philosophy come exchanges of clarity and tension, where we come face to face with the vertiginous creation of British democracy. Of the events surrounding the debates, Churchill creates a living, breathing, shouting scrapbook. A mother weeps for her dead baby, a soldier discusses the proper extent of dissent within an army, an inflamed butcher swings his cleaver as if to slice the class hatred he sees around him, a man is sent hysterical by the demands and process of reason.
The ensemble cast are full of boisterous energy, supplying the force required to propel us through the fragmented history. And while they sometimes lack punctuation as a whole, Jamie Ballard does a good job of modulating the high-end with a set of spry and nuanced performances, and where the low-end sometimes lacks rumble, the pathos is provided by a solidly ingenuous Helena Lymbery. Hannah Clarke's theatre in the round drags the audience into the tumult, the muddy stage is kicked up time and again, and there's a neat and moving symbolic moment involving light bulbs. And while the play's ideas are occasionally pushed aside by the sheer momentum, Polly Findlay's production controls the chaos, and succeeds in putting the audience squarely, dizzyingly within the events.
There is a profound and moving spirit of humanism at the heart of Light Shining. Churchill has frequently been claimed as postmodern: her foregrounding of race, gender, cultural history at odds with the old leftist guardians of British socialism. And while it's true in Light Shining she lifts the discussion away from the grounding in institutions and traditions, towards the pub and the parlour, the street and the community - here she cannot be framed as a dilettante relativist.
In the final scene, where the Levellers are collected around an oaken table, Churchill gives us both the demise and the hope of progressivism. The chilly wilderness where ideas of collective politics have crumbled into individual narratives are offset by a warm glow of a sense of comradeship. By explicating a communal event, she shows that rationality and logic do not belong to the realm of cold calculation, but can be used to welcome people, to forgive and construct futures. Churchill gives us an English Enlightenment forged around a table littered with bottles of London Pride.
In an ideal Britain this play would stand as a touchstone of history, the script jacked into Starkey's autocue, given its own channel, to be drawn on and remixed in public culture ad infinitum. The French and North Americans have their Olympe de Gougeses and Paines. Here Churchill reaches back and brings one of our forgotten radical moments into plain view. She gives us a living history, which speaks clearly to how we live and love. Another gem from the Arcola, and not a gilded robe in sight.
BRITISH THEATRE GUIDE
Reviewed by Howard Loxton, Monday 19 July 2010
http://www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/lightbuck-rev.htm
The title of Churchill's play, originally presented by Joint Stock in 1976, comes from that of an anonymous Digger pamphlet of 1649: Light Shining In Buckinghamshire, or A Discovery of the main ground, original Cause of all the Slavery in the world, but cheifly (sic) in England.
The play is set during the English Civil War in 1647 and shortly after when Diggers and Levellers in Cromwell's New Model Army were struggling to establish what they though would be Heaven on Earth
At its heart are the Putney Debates of October-November 1647, held in St Mary's church by Putney Bridge, at which soldiers and officers of the of the Army, including delegates elected by the men of the various regiments, and some civilians discussed the future of England. Topics covered whether they should continue negotiations with the King (executed two years later) and who should be given suffrage. While the levellers insisted that every man should have a vote, the generals, Oliver Cromwell himself and Henry Ireton (who wanted to bring in a constitutional monarchy), were adamant that voting rights would remain limited to those with property, issues on which Churchill particularly concentrates.
Many of those recruited to the Parliamentary side believed that they were genuinely fighting to change society, a society in which the poor starved and were whipped from parish to parish. We may not whip the poor today but as the gap between the rich and those in poverty grows ever wider the situation seems horribly familiar. Churchill shows how these people were driven by different brands of religious fundamentalism. A quarter century after the play was written that now feels like a frightening warning of what could happen here as what most of us think of as a secular society is challenged by faith groups with very different ideas from our liberal tolerance of others.
Many of these seventeenth century religionists were convinced that God's kingdom would begin on Earth in 1650 with Christ's second coming and saw this as an excuse for license while Churchill also presents the emerging idea of right and wrong as something determined by the individual, not God given precepts, even though wrapped up in the idea of God within the man.
This is a fascinating play that presents a pivotal point in English history when it might have been possible to create an idealistic commonwealth. Instead the actual Commonwealth that was established reinforced old privilege and pushed England one step nearer to modern Capitalism. One the one hand there are those who believe in equality and brotherhood, on the other those who will never relinquish their hold on property and privilege. Churchill does not argue their cases but shows us how those with power control the situation and the confusion of those whom they control.
Polly Findlay's in-the-round production, opens in darkness with the roar of war. Candles, shadows and psalm-like chanting create a powerful atmosphere but it makes its points with crystal clarity and Hannah Clark's set matches the content with a simple metaphor: the earth of England laid out in a cross..
There is no attempt to push the implicit contemporary message, however much one may sometimes think of contemporary politicians. The production creates a seventeenth century ambience that adds to our understanding of the historical situation but the Puritan tunics do seem to almost unnoticeably give way to more modern looking shoes and trousers as the play moves on and, at one moment, with everyone in shirt and braces, we seem to have flashed forward through Tolpuddle and the Chartists pointing towards today.
In its colour- and gender-blind casting six actors play at least a couple of dozen individual roles delivering sharp characterisation whether in impassioned argument or abject sorrow. Among them are Kobna Holdbrook-Smith's calm and smiling Cromwell and his fiery butcher, crying out against the excessive consumption of some when others starve; Michelle Terry's Ireton, unshakeably determined to preserve his own interests; Helena Lymbery's fiery soldier delegate and touchingly confused infanticide; Philip Arditti's junior officer whose heart is with his men but follows the orders of his superiors; Jamie Ballard's Ranter preacher and Christopher Harper's common soldier. They all play with such projection that you never miss a word in a production that does credit to all concerned.
As one character remarks, did Christ come to earth again in 1650 but no-one noticed? There was certainly the opportunity for real change. When will it come again? Could such egalitarianism ever flourish in what this green and pleasant land has become today?
Thursday, July 29, 2010 at 21:20