“The King James Bible Play” Has Some Very Serious Things to Say About Some Very Complicated Words – front mezz junkies, Theater News

The Stratford Festival Review: Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman turns biblical translation into a witty theatrical debate about power, history and interpretation

By Ross

What a fascinating project it is when a theatrical production attempts to take on something known through history books and starts pulling it apart, word by word, right there in front of me. And not just any book, but a holy book, or so they say, brought forth into the world for a whole number of complicated reasons. Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman’s world-première of The King James Bible Play begins with something wonderfully charming and somewhat silly. A regal man stands in the spotlight, chewing up the energy of the room while everyone waits to find out what exactly is inside a box. “Let’s get on with it,” becomes the exasperated cry from one, but nobody seems capable of getting on with anything until that box is opened and, lo and behold, an ananas is revealed, smelled, and then fully examined with the reverence of an exotic baby.

Candles on a birthday cake prompt another round of astonishment, and suddenly this supposedly serious gathering of men has become a distracted quorum fascinated by one of the simple pleasures sitting before them like a crown. Directed distinctly by Nina Lee Aquino (Crow’s Trident Moon) at the Stratford Festival’s Studio Theatre, the complex and multi-layered play knows how funny people can be when they are supposed to be doing some Very Important Work. Their astonishment becomes the doorway into something much larger, as the production settles into exploring what happens when a group of people, well, men, to be clear, is given the enormous responsibility of finding what they think are the right words to tell a story that will shape how generations understand faith, history, and authority. And we are blessed with a bird’s-eye view of their deliberations.

These men, in 1609, are the esteemed translators who have been ordained with the task of working on the text that will become the King James Bible, and the room quickly fills with the complicated business of deciding what words should mean. Sir Henry Savile, played by Cyrus Lane (CanStage’s Winter Solstice) with commanding energy, both comic and compelling, seems to understand the machinery of the project more than anyone at that solid central table. And he keeps trying to steer these men back towards the task, even as questions of ego and money, alongside King James’s obsession with witches, heresy, and time threaten to derail the process. The others, Gray Powell’s John Bois, Michael Spencer-Davis’s John Perrin, Rylan Wilkie’s George Abbot, and 郝邦宇 Steven Hao’s Willie, bring their own perspectives into the increasingly tangled conversation with focused determination, finding the compassion and complexity in their interactions. The relationships are fascinating and well orchestrated, yet it is the one between Sir Henry and his son that gives the intellectual debate a deeply human complication and surprising layer of pain and depth.

They argue over the duty to study, the responsibility of interpretation, and the uncomfortable business of deciding what constitutes truth, but it is the way they interact emotionally that resonates within the text. Robin Fisher’s set and costumes help create a world that allows the men to move between scholarly concentration and theatrical absurdity with a flap of a cape, while Michelle Ramsay’s pools of light beautifully isolate conversations and shifting alliances as the room seems to become its own character in the history being negotiated. The arguments are frequently intense and deliberate, laced with comic energy and astonishment, with something captivating burning underneath them. The question is not simply what these men believe. It is what happens when their beliefs become language that other people will inherit.

The play then reveals the other half of its intricate construction. An all-female theatre troupe takes over the table, trying to make a modern-day play about these old-school translators, and suddenly the act of translation takes on another meaning. The women are not simply reproducing what happened in 1609. They are trying to understand the people they have been asked to portray, deciding what deserves attention, what can be questioned, and what might have been lost between the historical record and the stage. Corbeil-Coleman (Madame Minister) makes the connection between translating a sacred text and embodying a character beautifully tangible.

Vivien Endicott-Douglas’s Han and 郝邦宇 Steven Hao’s Willie give us two sides of that exchange, but it is Deborah Hay’s Martie that becomes the emotional and intellectual centre of the contemporary rehearsal room, much like her fantastical counterpart. Hay uncovers Martie’s determination and frustration, particularly as time, money and artistic responsibility, once again, begin pressing against her. The women have seemingly inherited many of the problems that perplexed the men, mirroring the earlier frame quite adeptly, and Fisher’s design lets the two worlds feel connected without pretending that centuries of history can simply disappear behind a heavy curtain. John Gzowski’s sound and Michelle Ramsay’s lighting also become part of that intrepid translation, helping the production maintain the sense that these two rooms are constantly listening to each other.

The deeper the women go into the historical material, thanks to the push by the upstart Han, the more complicated the act of interpretation becomes. King James’s obsession with witches opens one conversation, while Mary and Joseph, questions of misogyny, the politics of authorship, and the personal dynamics between parents and children open others. Martie is running out of time as the men were running out of money and patience, and the contemporary theatre-making process begins to echo the committee we have already watched. The parallels are deliberately visible, and that is where the play becomes especially fascinating.

Theatre intersects with theology, while history tries to become performance, using words written and translated hundreds of years ago as the ingredients for these people to create a meal. They try to understand what those words did and what they still mean, but the conclusions seem to somewhat evade them. The script finds room for some of its best lines in the pressure placed on comedy itself, allowing the performers to acknowledge the strange business of trying to make serious ideas human. Angel Lo’s Anna, Liz Der’s Roni and Sara Topham’s Cath help build the contemporary ensemble, with each performer finding the tension between the person in the rehearsal room and the historical figure standing behind her. The result is an intriguing parallel that explores how identity can be translated through another person’s imagination, and how it can weigh down the world that follows it.

The production really starts to fire up the furnace when the two timelines begin to overlap. The men make unexpected appearances to help or guide the women as they struggle to understand what actually happened inside that committee and what it means to construct “the idea of truth.” Suddenly the play becomes a play within the play, and the Bible they are discussing and the production we are watching begin to overlap in a way we didn’t quite see coming. The structure is an astonishingly clever idea, and Aquino gives the actors the freedom to play inside its layers, allowing the intellectual arguments to retain their wit and the emotional exchanges to carry genuine weight.

Lane and Hay (StratFest’s London Assurance) are particularly compelling, with Lane bringing a forceful intelligence to Sir Henry and Hay giving Martie a vulnerability that keeps the contemporary story grounded and that secretly links the two together. Endicott-Douglas (StratFest’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and Hao (Tarragon’s Cockroach) bring their own wonderful nuance to the dual structure, finding a stance that lingers in the air long after the play ends. The entire ensemble does a beautiful job of finding aspects to explore in their paired relationships and in the layering between performance and interpretation. At times, though, the script strains under the weight of its own architecture. The parallels, at times, feel overly constructed, and moments of intellectual exploration can tip into a sermon-like insistence that tells us where to look before allowing us to discover the idea ourselves. The play is at its most exciting when it trusts the actors, the language, and the collision between its two worlds. And when it doesn’t, the framing feels forced.

What makes The King James Bible Play so magnificently ambitious is the way it keeps returning to the problem of words. The Bible being created by these men is built from the words they choose to tell a story about Jesus, a story that the play cheekily describes through the idea of the “first nepo baby.” The contemporary women are building another story from the words made available to them. Every act of interpretation carries on its backside the person doing the interpreting. Love and anger can exist in the same sentence. Uncertainty can become part of the search. A word can carry history, theology, power, privilege, and somebody’s personal experience all at once.

Corbeil-Coleman digs into the ideas bravely, and she doesn’t pretend to know how to resolve every question she raises. The final stretch feels somewhat forced as it tries to bring its many ideas into alignment, and I found myself wanting to return to the beginning, back to that box and the ridiculous fascination with an ananas, mainly because there is something intriguing and lovely about the idea that even a monumental project begins with people standing in a room trying to figure out what something means. The King James Bible became a text that travelled through centuries, but The King James Bible Play, projected on the back wall as promised, asks us to watch the people standing before it, doing the work, carrying words from one realm to another, from one stance to another, from page to stage. After all the arguments, all the scholarship and all the performance, we may still need to look at the words one more time and ask what they mean.