I am not what you would call religious. My feeling is that religion, like politics, does more harm than good. All about power corrupting – but don’t get me started. But religion has the distinction of being responsible for many more wars, much more genocide and much more intolerance that politics ever was. The difference was that it was all done in the name of righteousness, love and understanding. Hmmm.

That said, I freely and happily acknowledge that without religion we would have no great classical music and not many old master paintings; that art, as we know it, would hardly exist. The church was for centuries the greatest patron of music and painting throughout Europe, though luckily (or not) theatre was one of the few branches of the arts to escape the influence of the church.

So, an evening of religion in the theatre? Simon Callow’s one man show, The Man Jesus was, I have to admit, impressive stuff not only the performance but the content as well. But was it about religion? Or was it, as the title implies, just about one of the men responsible for it? The latter I think. The writer Matthew Hurt has himself performed a miracle managing to swerve away from Jesus the Messiah and give us Jesus the man, the son of a carpenter.

Mr Callow, to me, is very much an actor of the old school. I see him very much part of the tradition of Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud. He has a certain style, a certain exaggerated panache and command of the stage that you don’t get very much nowadays. I hate to use clichés but Mr Callow really did bring Jesus to life as he told, in simple dramatic (rather than preachy) style, some of the great episodes from the gospels.

It is not Mr Callow that tells the stories, it is those that were there at the time. It is the disciples Simon and James, a rather camp Scottish Judas, a rather butch Glaswegian John the Baptist, and two rather upper crust-toffs in the form of King Herod and Pontius Pilot, plus, of course, Barabbas, a couple of Marys et al. All this is achieved by Mr Callow going through what is probably his full range of voices and regional accents (that’s British regional, not Palestinian), so much so that you could almost visualise Alistair McGowan doing the show. There were lots of moments of comedy and the piece makes much of the fact that Jesus was a fairly common name and that there was more than one of them causing the Romans trouble.

Interestingly, the play was very non-committal when it came to stating that Jesus was the actual Messiah and the son of God. It did not seem to endorse any of the claims made by the protagonists and the story ended directly after the crucifixion, stopping short of discussing the resurrection, the bit of the story that is fairly fundamental to Christianity.

This was a tour-de-force, a truly virtuoso performance from Simon Callow, regardless of the subject, aided only by a rather large pile of chairs and some dramatic lighting. It was a mesmerising theatrical event that would probably encourage you to get out your dusty old bible and look at it with senses new. The evening would certainly have informed, excited and enlightened you more than any be-robed priest could ever do. ★★★★★      Michael Hasted

05/10/14