The Heresy of Love

by Helen Enmundson

seen at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre on 3 August 2015

This production of the play (originally commissioned by the RSC in 2012) is directed by John Dove and features Naomi Frederick as Sister Juana, Sophia Nomvete as Juanita, Gwyneth Keyworth as Angelica, Gabrielle Lloyd as Mother Marguerita, Anthony Howell as Bishop Santa Cruz, Patrick Driver as Father Antonio and Phil Whitchirch as Archbishop Aguiar y Sejas.

The play concerns Mexico's first (17th century) playwright and poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a Hieronymite nun. The convents of Mexico were the refuge of many unmarried women, and some were renowned for the sophistication of some of their nuns. Sor Juana was highly intelligent, amassing a considerable library of theological and philosophical books; she also wrote plays and poems and had the favour of the vice-regal court.

However, the arrival of a new archbishop sent from Madrid threatens the whole system of court patronage and the appreciation and commissioning of secular works from religious houses. The archbishop wishes to root out such dangerous accommodations and compromises with the world, and is especially critical of any woman who presumes to meddle in masculine affairs such as intellectual thought. With a local bishop frustrated in his hopes of preferment, who determines to use any prop that comes to hand to discomfit the archbishop, the scene is set for a critical confrontation of ideas, politics and personal hopes. 

The Globe's open layout was used to good effect even in delineating the nature of an enclosed sisterhood - a large open grate was swung across the stage to indicate the boundaries of the secular and sacred spaces, and it was at once clear that the border could be strongly kept or dangerously permeable, depending on who was invigilating. Juana's niece Angelica found it all too easy to pass notes to an amorous courtier, and was frighteningly unaware of the danger. The Globe audience, always ready for comedic touches, was diverted by this flirtation, which in its way is very like the subplots of Shakespearean plays - but with more serious consequences.

Some were inordinately titivated when the bishop confessed that he was attracted to Sister Juana, as ecclesiastical waywardness is the scandale du jour. However, this admission led to nothing clandestine, but rather highlighted the bishop's uneasy half-awareness of the bad light in which his rapport with women could be seen. The issue was far more serious than sensationalist. Indeed as the play progressed it gave eloquent expression to many complex and opposing points of view about church authority and personal freedom, and these were delivered with forceful clarity by all the cast. The outcome - the crushing of Sister Juana's right to express herself - was only to be expected; the justifications for this, though hateful for us to listen to, were not caricatured, and so her predicament was the more tragic. Her resulting self-mortification was perhaps harder for the modern mind to embrace, but was clearly bound up with contemporary notions of responsibility and penance, which are now deeply unfashionable.

Naomi Frederick was captivating as Sister Juana, brimming with intellectual excitement and sure of her eloquence, fatally sure that it would serve her in a successful defence of her position. But her blindness to her niece's predicament, and her failure to understand the opportunism of the bishop's support, were both all-too-plausible. Around her, the sisters and Mother Superior and servants portrayed both the safety and the backbiting of any community, while the male clergy played their own political games as best they could under the intransigent archbishop. 

Bishop Santa Cruz is perhaps the more difficult character to accept, as he turns so easily where he sees his advantage lying, and the crucial turn occurs in a soliloquy that came too conveniently when needed. However Anthony Howell portrayed an ambitious and personally attractive yet machiavellian prelate with smooth conviction and charm.