You have to go back to Shaw’s Saint Joan to find the last great theatrical clash between spiritual and secular power. But while John Wolfson, curator of rare books at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, has had the big, bold idea of bringing together Tiberius Caesar and Jesus Christ, his play lacks the intellectual firepower and musical eloquence one associates with Shaw.
Wolfson has seized on a passage in the New Testament apocrypha which suggests that the ailing Roman emperor sought to employ the miraculous healing power of a magician called Jesus. In Wolfson’s version, Tiberius sails from Capua to Judea to find this mystery man and winds up in an inn at Lydda (modern-day Lod in Israel). Matters are complicated by the presence of Tiberius’s insane, power-hungry nephew, Caligula, and by the fact that Christ has been crucified shortly before the emperor’s arrival. But finally Tiberius and the risen Christ meet for a showdown to debate the respective power of earthly empire and spiritual redemption.
It’s a perfectly good framework for a play, but if Shaw taught us one thing, it is that drama depends on an exact balance between opposing forces. Here, however, the figure whom Edward Gibbon referred to as “the dark, unrelenting Tiberius” dominates the action with his combination of wilful tyranny and physical frailty; in comparison, Christ seems a shadowy presence dispensing random aphorisms. The play catches fire when the two men meet, but the roles are reversed and Tiberius’s defence of the awesome power of the Roman empire is easily outsmarted by Christ’s attack on a culture of enslavement and by his assertion that: “Rome is not rich – its Caesars are.” You feel it is game, set and match to Christ.
Wolfson also faces the problem of finding a suitable language for his drama. Happily, he avoids bombast and pseudo-biblical archaism but too easily falls into comic bathos.
“Excuse me, are you Jesus of Nazareth?” seems one of the less likely inquiries by a Roman emperor and, unless I misheard, we are told at one point that the campy Caligula is “on a singing tour of Judea”. That idea is reinforced when a slave girl, who has been tied hand and foot by Caligula, saucily asks him: “Do you take requests?” The piece, however, gets a strong, clear production by Andy Jordan and is well acted.
Stephen Boxer, who has played Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus at Stratford, knows all about crazed Romans and captures vividly Tiberius’s mix of insensate cruelty and fear of death. Samuel Collings successfully conveys Christ’s superior wisdom without seeming arch or smug. There is good support from David Cardy as a nervy astrologer, Joseph Marcell as one of three Magi and Philip Cumbus as a deranged Caligula who is, somewhat improbably, given a sanely prophetic speech hinting at the future bloodshed inspired by religious wars.
The play is deeply flawed but, at a time when drama is monotonously secular, it at least has the courage to remind us there is a world elsewhere.
• At Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London, until 17 September. Box office: 020-7401 9919.
