The "Rehabilitation" of Howard Brenton

In the past year, playwright Howard Brenton has returned to Britain's large national stages after almost a decade's absence. Fall 2005 saw Paul, produced by the National Theatre, followed in winter 2006 by a revival of The Romans in Britain (1980) at the Sheffield Crucible. August brought In Extremis to Shakespeare's Globe—one of the few new plays produced in that venue—and in September the revival of Pravda (1985), written with David Hare, received a coproduction between the Chichester Festival and Birmingham Repertory Theatre.

The new plays, Paul and In Extremis, focus on the nature and power of religious faith. As Brenton has always created plays that address contemporary sociopolitical concerns, it is not surprising that he turns now toward the fraught relationship between religious belief and human conduct. In the West, the ascendancy of the Christian Right on one hand and fears of Islamic fundamentalism on the other have provoked religious intolerance and justified concern with the excesses of fanatic belief. Faith is a vexed issue in our time; sometimes secular artists dismiss it as not worthy of serious consideration or represent it only in broad stereotypes as repressive or simplistic. But we live in a moment when understanding how and why people believe in various spiritual realities is critical if we are to combat the intolerance, violence, and wars of religion that threaten our fledgling century. Brenton's plays dramatize the contradictions of Christianity, but also implicate the complex relationships between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and the multifaceted character of belief itself. In this way, Brenton opens up an aesthetic mode of inquiry that juxtaposes historical time and contemporary praxis.

Political writers have had a strong post WWII presence on British stages, although their fortunes have tended to rise or fall depending on the changing winds of politics and fashion. Catastrophic international events in recent years have once again made their presence welcome, even necessary, and new young artistic directors such as Nick Hytner at the National Theatre and Sam West at the Sheffield Crucible have commissioned seasoned writers, now in or near their 60s, to help their theatres respond through engaging, provocative works.¹ Following his appointment in 2003, Hytner began programming for a diverse young audience, offering seats for £10 (less than $20), opening his first season with Stewart Lee and Richard Thomas's Jerry Springer: The Opera (2003), and following up with the accomplished black actor Adrian Lester as the icon of the nation in a modern-dress Henry V. Hytner also extended a written invitation to Howard Brenton, David Hare, Caryl Churchill, and David Edgar, mixing this "old guard" with newer voices such as Martin McDonagh, Owen McCafferty, and Kwame Kwei-Armah. The National Theatre under Hytner has become a player in public discourse again after the disappointing conservatism of former artistic director Trevor Nunn.

Brenton responded to Hytner's invitation with Paul, investigating the historical St. Paul and his treacherous times. It opened to strong critical acclaim and was nominated for the Olivier Award for best new play of 2005, reestablishing Brenton as one of Britain's foremost political writers whose insights have an important contribution to make to our ongoing efforts to come to terms with the tensions of our own times and the legacy of earlier ages, at a moment when religion is a—perhaps the—political issue.

In the 1970s and '80s, Brenton became a highly successful playwright as his imaginative and wide-ranging dramas were regularly produced at the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the Royal Court Theatre (Britain's premier theatre for new writing). In 1976, Weapons of Happiness was commissioned to inaugurate the Lyttleton Theatre in the National's then-new South Bank complex and won the Evening Standard Best Play award. In 1980, Romans in Britain provoked a right-wing crusader for censorship in the arts, Mary Whitehouse, to pursue a private prosecution against director Michael Bogdanov for the simulated rape of a Druid by a Roman soldier. For Whitehouse it perpetrates gross indecency; for Brenton, "it dramatizes a war crime" (Brenton 2006a). He survived this so-called scandal...