KING DAVID MAN OF BLOOD

Mercury Theatre Colchester

01.06.10

reviewed for The Public Reviews

Award-winning regional playwright Fraser Grace's long-awaited collaboration with Mercury Artistic Director Dee Evans is a bold gloss on the biblical King David.

We begin in a very chic Heaven, with Lucifer and Jehovah sparring, as they remember Job. Andrew Neil's world-weary God is challenged by Lucifer to put David to the test. “Leave the skin on the custard of a man's soul, and he'll always say God is good.”

The devil has one of the best parts in the play, an opportunity eagerly seized by the excellent Tony Casement. In this celestial prologue he sports a dashing black bowler hat and sips sparkly cocktails. But back on earth he appears as an initially subservient slave, gradually evolving as a kind of Baldrick figure to taunt and defy his master.

David Tarkenter's King has long outgrown his Goliath-slaying days, his beloved Jonathan, and his music, though he does favour Cusay [the Lucifer slave] with a debased Psalm. He knows he is God's chosen, and can do no wrong. Bloody massacres, Bathsheba, God will approve it all. But he is jaded, and will not go to war this year. His godless adviser [Roger Delves-Broughton] hangs himself, his personal chaplain [an urbane Ignatius Anthony as Nathan the ex-prophet] finds a personal God in the wilderness, and David longs to be cursed by Jehovah for doing the devil's work. “If God is good, then Evil must be cursed !” Tarkenter's King is a troubled soul, but with huge reserves of strength and a noble stillness which held the stage superbly.

Bathsheba – here called Bethsebe in homage to the Elizabethan playwright George Peele – was brought to vivid life by Clare Humphrey. Her encounter with David [beautifully lit] and her physical grief at the death of Uriah the heathen Hittite [Delroy Brown] were some of the strongest moments in the play. The other women were Mother God [a kind of divine PA – Christine Absalom] and David's favourite wife Abigail, a wise realist sympathetically played by Kristin Hutchinson.

This was clearly a story of desert warriors, veiled women and a cruel God. The set was monumental, a massive wall with the Sistine finger of God writ large, the height used effectively for the palace in progress and the swimming pool. At the end, perhaps redundantly, we are shown the King in modern guise, celebrating victory as Lucifer plays cards, and soldiers, with little Kileab, David's second son. God, meanwhile, has finally been rejected, and is relieved to walk away and leave David, and mankind, to their own devices.

This play has the timeless quality of Greek drama, and brings some heavy theology thrillingly onto the stage. But there is much humour and humanity, too. It certainly deserves to live on after Colchester, though it can scarcely hope for a more eloquent, epic production than this from the Mercury's own amazing company.

photograph of David Tarkenter and Clare Humphrey by Robert Day

this piece first appeared on The Public Reviews