Emrys Jones reviews a production of Murder in the Cathedral

Canterbury Cathedral: not quite as irrelevant as the last one.

Emrys Jones wrote an intriguing review essay of a production of Murder in the Cathedral at Stratford, published in 1993. In the essay he argues that (as Craig Raine explains) Eliot's play is highly dramatic - and that the drama, though helped by historical authenticity of the events staged and significantly enriched by directorial additions, is clearer because its religious appeal is now more or less defunct. Jones says 'it's a play not a theological or devotional discourse!'

I find this (naturally) a remarkable judgement, and the latter comment a false dichotomy. Removing the 'religious' component of the death of the Archbishop leaves you with what kind of death exactly? In what way is the death at all honourable or noble or admirable or representative if it is a secular martyrdom of some kind? In fact, Eliot makes sure that we cannot make precisely this move. There is no 'cause' for which he dies - he is no MLK or Gandhi, no secularised saint. In fact, Thomas resists at every turn secularising himself: that is surely the point! He does not even succomb to pride - unless you side with his murderers, who justify themselves (as he does not) by accusing him of delusions of spiritual grandeur. If the religious component is excised like that, is he not guilty of neglect of his duty, his people and his country? Is he not convicted of seditious action, or wilfully provoking the wrath of the king in order to secure his place in history? What comfort or lesson can modern audiences take from this?

Raine perceptibly ask whether the play can still work if there is this defunct core at the centre of it. Quite...

I think this is illustrative of the contemporary inability to come to terms with the martyr as anything but a pitiable and possibly dangerous figure. If the convictions that move Thomas do not convict the audience at some level, then I find it hard to know how the drama can have any purchase other than as a historical curio. That these events are historical is perhaps more significant than it at first seems: because these events are not invented as a morality tale of rather sentimental proportions, because these are representations of real people engaged in what was a well testified event locatable and date-able, then we are not afforded the luxury of dismissing them as somehow fantastical and inhuman. This is likewise true of the martyrs of the church: there they stand, as real people prepared to be unwavering in their conviction of the truth, such that we cannot deny them. Their flesh was burnt, and torn by wild animals, and pierced.

Jones also writes:

Robert Speaght has spoken as an actor of the difficulty he found at first in coming to temrs with the passivity of the protagonist.

This is something I have also noticed about the play and about Thomas, and it is quite deliberate on Eliot's part that it be so. Thomas is NOT a man of action; he is a man of passion.