Award-winning playwright Justin Butcher, writer/performer of the world-famous ‘Scaramouche Jones’, the hit anti-war satire ‘The Madness of George Dubya’ and the acclaimed ‘Go to Gaza, Drink the Sea’ now turns his pen to perhaps the greatest story of all, The Passion of The Christ told from Satan’s perspective.
The Devil’s Passion offers a radically fresh perspective on the timeless narrative, an audacious hell’s-eye view of the Easter story.
More information can be found here.
You’re bringing The Devil’s Passion to Edinburgh Fringe, what can you tell us about the show?
Well, it’s the ‘greatest story ever told’, but as you’ve never heard it before – a kind of audacious ‘hell’s-eye view’ of the Passion of Christ, told from Satan’s perspective and framed satirically against a contemporary ‘War on Terror’ backdrop.
33 AD. Jesus enters Jerusalem to fulfil his destiny. Satan ascends from Hell to stop him.
A battle begins – for the soul of humanity.
… Within the next hour, our operatives will isolate, engage and capture or kill the notorious leader of the most extreme, dangerous and contagious ideology to emerge in the modern era, whose terror activities represent the gravest threat to our interests across the region and the wider world. I refer, of course, to the radical preacher and populist demagogue Y’shua Bar Yessuf, the man known by way of shorthand to our operatives as ‘Jesus’ …
It’s a (misleadingly-termed) ‘solo show’ but it’s a team effort. It takes a village, they say, to raise a child – and it takes an amazing creative team to put a solo performer on stage in what I hope will be a memorable piece. My director, the brilliant Guy Masterson, needs no introduction in Edinburgh, but the whole remarkable multi-award-winning team – Sean Cavanagh (designer), Jack Arnold (sound design), Damian Hale & Christian Krupa (video design) & Tom Turner (lighting design) are each fantastically original and creative practitioners, conspiring here to make something which I hope will be really special. Against Sean’s stark, dystopian ‘bunker’ design, Damian and Chris’s vivid, witty and subtly evocative video design conjure the heat and sand (almost the smells and tastes) of the Middle East, while Jack’s haunting, atmospheric sound design carries us back and forth between the ancient world and our own, enchanting and disturbing all at once.
What inspired you to tell this story from a different perspective?
Ionesco talked about depaysement in theatre (lit. ‘losing your own country’). My hope is to provoke a new encounter with the timeless, almost mythic drama of the Passion story – at times comic and irreverent, at times poetic, pungent and, I hope, moving and intriguing.
The Passion is so rich – themes of good and evil, religious extremism, freedom, rebellion, life and death, timeless and strikingly modern. In The Devil’s Passion, by exploring this 2000-year old narrative against our contemporary backdrop, I think I’ve discovered a kind of ‘mutual illumination’ – the present shining light on the past and vice versa, searing through some of our current blind spots and divisive obsessions. The Annunciation is depicted as the ‘radicalisation’ of a 15-year old schoolgirl, through whom ‘the Enemy enters in’. Satan’s battle is waged in defence of the ‘gates’ of ‘our civilisation’ against the ‘enemies of freedom’. Through an occupied territory bristling with checkpoints, walls, razor-wire fences and watchtowers, Jesus heads to Jerusalem. Satan – imagined as a kind of Security Chief, CIA-director kind of character – enlists the audience to join him in preventing Jesus’s ‘suicide mission’, realising his plan all along has been to die, to assault the gates of hell itself. He must do all he can to keep Jesus alive or risk being destroyed …
A lifelong influence has been the late, great Dario Fo – creator of Mistero Buffo (The Comic Mysteries) and many other great satires, a virtuosic solo performer, director and playwright whose lacerating and hilarious satires drew on ancient traditions of commedia dell’arte, rough folk theatre and the comedies of ancient Rome.
Hey was a kind of ‘theatrical mentor’ – though I only got to see him perform once, aged 90, just a few months before he died. He performed two 40-minute monologues from Mistero Buffo and held a live audience of around 3,000 people in the palm of his hand. He loved the folk performance traditions of mediaeval Lombardy and elsewhere – the travelling jongleurs, giulliari and comic actors who would often perform religious narratives but from a radical ‘peasant perspective’, wresting these ‘sacred stories’ from the ‘sacred space’ of the churches, stealing back the stories stolen from the common people by the religious authorities and the feudal state. In the mouths of the jongleurs, Biblical narratives became radical, polemical, often comic or vulgar – stories of liberation – as they were always intended to be.
Another major influence: the brilliant David Suchet, who played Satan in a fantastic BBC R3 production of The Devil’s Passion a few years ago and has always been a wonderfully generous advocate for my work. Also, the late, great Peter Shaffer, for whom I directed Black Comedy at his 80th birthday celebrations in 2006, in Colorado Springs. A humble genius, such a beautiful writer, with extraordinary depth and compassion in his portrayals of evil, malice and violence, as in the characterisation of Salieri in Amadeus, or in his exploration of tortured ecstasy in Equus.
I’ve always been interested to delve into human behaviour, psyche, stories through absurdity, the grotesque, clowning, satire, commedia-style work – these seem to be my characteristic style. Scaramouche Jones put me on the map as a writer, 22 years ago, when the late, great Pete Postlethwaite premiered the role, directed by Rupert Goold, with the Bristol Old Vic at the 2001 Dublin Theatre Festival, just a few weeks after 9/11. Pete was amazing as Scaramouche and toured it on and off for the next couple of years, all over the world. And it keeps going – last year saw the Japanese-language premiere in Tokyo, the previous year Shane Ritchie released a filmed version on Stream Theatre, and I performed the 20th anniversary production, at the Wilton’s Music Hall. The old clown marches on …
What was the most challenging thing about writing The Devil’s Passion?
I think that most evil acts are carried out by people, entities, corporations, societies, tribes who, in some sense, think they’re ‘doing the right thing’. Masquerading as a ‘good’ motivation – patriotism, loyalty to the firm, loyalty to your ethnic group, maintaining professional standards, or even upholding values perceived to be politically correct – cruel, hurtful and destructive actions can be carried out in the name of some ‘greater good’, or carried out while no one’s looking because they prefer not to look. ‘Satan disguises himself as an angel of light’, as St Paul wrote in his letter to the early church in Corinth. Using the metaphor of spiritual warfare, he wrote about the ‘powers and principalities’ – the ‘presiding spirits’ (or, as we might say, ethos, identity, collective story, prevailing myth) of a nation, a community, a city, an army, a political faction, an organisation – which wield immense power for good or ill. The ancient Greeks talked about the concept of a ‘daimon’ – an inner or attendant spirit or presiding force. Psychology talks today about corporate myths or narratives or ‘brands’.
Equally, the harm which we do to ourselves and others in our confusions about love, relationships, family, friendships, self-worth etc often stems from some tangled perception about trying to ‘do the right thing’.
I was interested to explore where evil hides or masquerades in these territories of psychology and human interaction, and attempt a serious characterisation of Satan as someone who appears actively to believe he’s doing the right thing, trying to enlist the audience’s sympathy, understanding and support in his agenda, mingling every lie with enough plausibility to carry you along – if you like, making the best possible ‘case’ for Satan. Not always a very comfortable mindset to embrace … but isn’t that what our culture needs to grapple with? A subtler, more nuanced, perhaps more generous approach to understanding human frailty – how the ‘good guy’ can sometimes be a bastard, and how the ‘bad guy’ can often have a lot of good in them – and if we want to strive together to improve the human condition, we need to get more comfortable with complexity – and less judgmental.
And, of course, I’m trying to tell an ultra-familiar story, I hope, from a totally new perspective, to enable audiences to have an entirely new encounter with the narrative, and to make it entertaining!
And what are you most looking forward to about bringing it to the Fringe?
Despite the gigantic competition, and the plethora of solo shows, I still think audiences at the Fringe are curious for new and different stories, new perspectives, and relish being challenged and stimulated – intellectually, morally, emotionally – at the same time as being entertained, tickled, delighted, fascinated. I really think The Devil’s Passion is attempting to do all these things. I think we’re all hungry, in a straightforward childlike way, to surrender ourselves to a great storyteller who takes us by the hand and leads us off to a magical land where we hear wondrous and fabulous tales about strange creatures … and, in the end, we realise it was a story about us. Isn’t that what the best stories do?
I think audiences are up for this at the Fringe, and I can’t wait to sharpen my wits, my storytelling skills and my writing against the vigour and curiosity and discernment of the Edinburgh crowds!
What would you say to anyone thinking of booking to see The Devil’s Passion?
I’m aware I’ve dropped a few names in my answers above but, less name-droppingly, I hope there will be lots of ‘ordinary’ people like you and me, up for a great bit of storytelling, wanting to have their imaginations enchanted, their hearts stirred, their intrigue tickled, their minds inspired … the old, the young and everyone in between. People who feel wounded, troubled, condemned, people who don’t always feel good about themselves – this is a story that speaks to everyone, regardless of belief, and offers hope, challenge and soul-piercing beauty.
