Light Shining in Buckinghamshire

by Caryl Churchill

seen at the National Theatre (Lyttleton) on 16 April 2015

The play, directed by Lyndsey Turner, features a cast of eighteen speaking actors taking some twenty-seven parts supported by forty-four members of the Community Company, a group created from the outreach work of the National Theatre's Learning Department.

'Light Shining' looks at the English Civil War and the Commonwealth not as a conventional history play dramatising pivotal historical events (the King's duplicity, the battles, and so forth) but rather through a whole series of vignettes in which ordinary people grapple with the perplexing ideas of their time: dissent, obedience, millennial hopes, freedom, bondage, religious faith. The first half closes with scenes from the Putney Debates of 1647, taken from the transcripts of the sessions. Here, significant historical characters such as Oliver Cromwell and his son-in-law Henry Ireton are indeed present, but there is no attempt to characterise them or to provide their 'back story' - the focus is entirely on the debate concerning democratic representation.

The production opens with an extraordinary tableau. The entire acting area is presented as a vast dining table, crowded with opulent platters of roasted meat and other dishes, amongst which the speaking actors move and are spotlit. All around this table are soberly dressed mid-seventeenth-century figures - dark clothes, white lace collars, those giveaway fashionable but fairly austere hats. While the foodstuffs are on the 'table' they are eating comfortably, oblivious of the labourers and vagrants (dressed timelessly) who are being recruited into the New Army or who are discovering religious dissent for themselves. But the all the food is gradually being removed. By the time of the Putney Debates, even the table cloth has gone, revealing bare boards on which chairs can be set; and those who were once guests at the feast are now the stenographers of the debates, quills busy as the arguments about property and enfranchisement play out. The visual inspiration of a contemporary print of the Debates (helpfully present in the program) is now clear. In the second half even these boards are torn up and removed to reveal bare earth as the fate of the Diggers is told to us.

Any expectation that we should be following a narrative story through all the upheavals of the time is constantly dashed. There is not even the connecting thread of (say) a Mother Courage figure to act as a picaresque guide. Those characters who do reappear do so because their experiences refract the issues, or because they are representatives of the groups whose positions are being displayed.

This is perhaps harder to grasp with so many actors on stage. It is all too natural to focus on a perceived personality as he or she speaks in the different scenes. The original production of the play (in 1976) apparently had only six performers, which must have given a completely different impression. An intimation of the impact of that arrangement occurs late in this production in a bleak scene of dashed hopes and cross purposes between a  Leveller, a Ranter, a disillusioned army man, a vagrant, a drunkard, and a radical preacher.  With no-one else on stage at all, these six speak powerfully of the acute dislocation of their times.

The seriousness with which these issues were faced, discussed, argued over and fought for is hard for a modern audience to appreciate. The starkness of some of the statements seemed initially to have more in common with the 'what have the Romans done for us?' comedy of Monty Python, and there were some ripples of laughter over the tortured ramblings of the morbidly religious young man who spoke almost  the first lines of the play - but the laughter could not catch when it became plain that this was not a comedic turn. Likewise his later blasphemies as a Ranter, though close to manic comedy, were also uncomfortably rather than plainly funny. 

This painstaking excavation of the lived experience of seventeenth century people reached its finest point in the Putney Debates, where the immense seriousness of the topic was matched by the dignified contours of the language used. This in turn entailed an old-fashioned but quietly moving courtesy between the debaters. Passionately held and incompatible views could have led to violence and anger, and nearly did so, but the desire to do good and to discover the right path seemed just strong enough to prevent total disarray. When no agreement seemed possible, Cromwell intervened to propose a committee. For some this was clearly the beginning of the end, but once again we had to infer this from later conversations; it was always vital to pay attention to everything that was being said.