In the year 597 Pope Gregory sent an Italian priest named Augustine to Britain to convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity and the rule of Rome. Augustine, who went on to become the first Archbishop of Canterbury, did his pope proud. Not only did he convert King Ethelbert; in one day alone he is said to have baptised 1,000 people. His sole setback came a few years later, when he failed to persuade his Welsh neighbours to obey Rome and saw them butchered by unbelievers from Northumberland.
Peter Oswald, writer in residence at Shakespeare's Globe, came across Bede's version of the story as a schoolboy and has used it as the basis of the first play commissioned for the modern Globe. Like Shakespeare with his history plays, Oswald has aimed far higher than a simple retelling of the past. Augustine's Oak is not just the tale of Augustine's mission to wrest this land from fat Freya and mad, farting Woden, as Ethelbert's Christian wife Bertha characterises the old gods. It is a tale of war, between the Christians and the unseen but all-devouring King of Northum- berland. It is also two love stories: first Ethelbert and Bertha, then their daughter Tata and the exiled King Edwin. And it is an exploration of dogmatism.
Both couples are divided by faith, with Bertha feigning coldness toward Ethelbert in the hope that frustration will drive him into the arms of Jesus, and Tata and Edwin each seesawing between belief and non-belief, but rarely in sync.
Fortunately, while Oswald is a committed Christian, he resists the temptation to give the angels all the best lines. It is clear that Ethelbert owes his lambent humanity to a culture where it's accepted that even deities are forgiven their faults ("Imagine the horror," he says at one point. "A perfect God!"), while Bertha's self-righteousness clearly owes much to her vision of a perfect God. At all times, there is an awareness of the ridiculous side of fervour, and a pleasing tendency to undercut the most impassioned speech with a bathetic riposte.
Tim Carroll presides over a tight production, with the only false notes the scenes with the visionary, ranting Welshmen. The acting is generally impeccable: Martin Turner, Yolanda Vazquez, Philippa Stanton and Sean O'Callaghan give flawless performances as the central couples of Ethelbert and Bertha, Tata and Edwin, and Marcello Magni is both side-splitting and heartbreaking as the noble fool Lilla.
Yet despite flawless acting and taut direction from Carroll, this ambitious, multi-layered work doesn't quite gel. Even in two-and-a-half hours, there's no time to fully explore the subplots, and too many characters disappear with just a few lines of farewell or an offstage death (sometimes, as with the insipid Augustine, this doesn't seem much of a loss). Lesser figures - particularly the assorted Christian and pagan priests - blend into one another and at times seem to do little more than dress the stage. After a while the temptation is to say to hell with the plot and just listen to the words.
Fortunately, the mix of prose and verse more than repays the attention. Taken line by line, this is a beautiful work - warm and full of humour. The script mixes prose and verse, and both sing. There are enough echoes of Shakespeare to keep his groupies happy, treated delicately enough to avoid pastiche. At times, as when Bertha describes her true feelings for Ethelbert - "My heart is like a robin on his thumb" - you feel old Shakey might even have been jealous.
In rep till September 24; box office: 0171-401 9919
