|
Views and Reviews
This page contains book, film and play reviews
by people at St John's Roslyn, and other bits and pieces which
don't logically fit on any of the other pages of our website. Contributions
for this page are welcome!
Please click on one of the titles below to
go directly to that section.
The Theology of Star Wars (3-Jun-05)
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Review by Alan Firth
There's something about
voyages of exploration that appeals to me, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
has always been my favourite of the seven Narnia books. The main characteristic
of voyages, though, is that they involve movement and lots of changes of scene;
this makes them inherently difficult to translate to the stage. In its
fourth Narnia play, which opened at the Mayfair Theatre on the 18th of September,
the Dunedin City Baptist Church has risen to the challenge.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, scripted and directed
by Erina Caradus, is structured almost like a cinema film, with rapid cuts
between scenes but no breaks in the action. The set design and
stage management is complex and very effective. Fine painted backdrops set the scene
on many of the islands,
while a mobile and versatile Dawn Treader set fills much of the stage
for the shipboard scenes. (The ship's crew double as stagehands, to
the extent that handling the ship is sometimes indistinguishable from handling
the scenery.)
The script is very close to the book, with none of the major
scenes missing - pirates, monsters, enchanted lands, invisible people, magicians
and the Great Lion all packed into a two-hour play. The story is largely
a series of separate incidents, but they're connected by the characters,
particularly the odious Eustace (inadvertently turning into a dragon takes
the phrase "character development" to new heights), and by the quest to the
eastern end of the world, where the three main plot strands - the lost Narnian
lords, Reepicheep's destiny, and Aslan's relationship with the
visitors from our own world - all come together.
The play has
a fairly small cast, but some of those people play five or six different
roles in the course of the performance. Characters of particular note
are Eustace (played by Matthew Scadden and, briefly but expressively, by
Shari McCabe), and Lucy (Dara Caradus), both of whom have substantial scenes
of their own. The dragon costumes are wonderful. Mike Crowl as
Reepicheep makes a memorable if over-tall mouse, and Greg Brook reprises his
role as a solemn and reassuring Aslan. I missed the numerous talking
animals of the earlier plays, but the excitable and colourful Duffers almost
make up for their absence.
The conversation between the Duffers in their invisible phase
(pre-recorded) and the visible characters (live) must have been very difficult
to time properly, and this is just one small example of the skill and problem-solving
ingenuity that permeates the whole play. In fact, the only real problem
with the performance I attended was the disappointingly-small audience. This
is a production that deserves to be seen.
Reviews of the previous two D.C.B.C. Narnia plays can be
found below. Click here to visit
the Narnia Productions website.
Prince Caspian - the return to Narnia
Review by Alan Firth
Prince Caspian, which opened at the Mayfair Theatre on the
14th of September, is the third Narnia play produced by the Dunedin City
Baptist Church. (A review of their previous production, The Magician's
Nephew, appears below.) Now, you might wonder
why you should bother with a stage play when there's a big-budget film on
the way. After all, in a film you can portray talking animals and walking
trees in a believable way. You can follow characters from one room
to another and back without having to pause to shift the scenery. You
can cut back and forth between two scenes taking place simultaneously. You
can even go for a trip in a rowing-boat. Whereas on stage . . . well,
actually, you can do all of the above.
Once again, the D.C.B.C.'s set design and stage management
people have demonstrated their unfamiliarity with the word "impossible".
The script, by director Erina Caradus, closely follows the book, much
of which is about two journeys - those of Prince Caspian, fleeing his wicked
uncle and meeting a variety of Old Narnian allies, and of the four children
from Earth, on their way to Caspian's aid. This means that numerous
scene changes are inevitable, but the clever use of pre-recorded dialogue
and bridging scenes in front of the curtain, as well as some substantial
but very mobile scenery pieces, meant that there wasn't a significant pause
anywhere in the play except for the interval. (The designers have also
learnt from their mistakes - unlike in the previous play, the characters
could pick apples without making Velcro noises.)
And the animals? Well, they all had two arms and
two legs (even the Centaur), but they were made as believable as stage
talking animals are ever likely to get by costume, excellent makeup and
some spot-on portrayals of the different species' characteristics - from
flittery squirrels to sleepy bears. More elaborate were the walking
trees, which didn't look significantly like human actors.
Prince Caspian has a large cast with no one central
role, but two characters deserve particular mention. Firstly, the
dwarf Trumpkin (Susan Irvine), who ties both halves of the story together
and is present in almost every scene. The part was played to a high
standard throughout, with considerable humour. Secondly, the small
but valiant mouse Reepicheep (Mhairi Duncan); I think I can honestly say
I have never seen a mouse with such stage presence.
There were many other highlights - Prince Caspian's swordsmanship,
a dance of Fauns with live music, the chilling scene where Nikabrik conspires
with some Dark allies to bring back the White Witch, and the rather wonderful
sequence where Aslan wakes the magical creatures of the forest. Several
of the central characters delivered large amounts of dialogue without any
apparent difficulty.
I am looking forward to the film . . . but the play
was definitely worth seeing as well. There was no mention in the
programme of any future plans, but near the end of Prince Caspian
the title character vowed to sail to the East in search of the seven lost
Narnian lords. This isn't actually in the original novel; it's a piece
of background from the next Narnia book. So perhaps we
can also look forward to a D.C.B.C. production of The Voyage of the Dawn
Treader . . .
'Prince Caspian' was performed by Narnia Productions
in September 2007.
A
Thought for Easter
A few minutes ago I watched through binoculars as the star Antares
approached occultation by the Moon. Normally a bright star, it was
all but invisible in the Moon's glare. According to today's newspaper,
it should reappear at about midnight - precisely the beginning of Easter
Day.
It's a very nicely timed symbol of death and rebirth,
but the metaphor goes much deeper than that. The Moon represents
death. From where we stand, it looks (and is) big and bright and
overwhelming. The star stands for God. It looks faint and
frail, and it's so easy to lose sight of it. But the star is never
overwhelmed. In reality it's very much larger and brighter than the
Moon. The Moon hides it, but in real terms it can never really affect
it.
This is the message of Easter - not that pain and death
and suffering aren't real, but that God is more real, more bright, and
entirely eternal.
Alan
Firth
Crevices
A poem
for Christmas
(When Jesus was born He was placed in a phatne.
This Greek word can be translated as 'manger', but a phatne
is not the piece of wooden furniture shown in many Christmas cards.
It's a cavity made in the thick earth wall of a building, and used
as a manger or for storage.)
A hand-scooped crevice in an earthen wall;
A new-born baby wrapped in linen bands
And watched by shepherds, and with fragrant oil
Anointed King by men from distant lands,
While angels beckon forth with clarion call.
A crevice carved in cold and ancient rock;
A body covered by a shroud, forlorn
While mist drifts by and solemn soldiers watch,
And Mary brings anointing oil at dawn,
And angels turn back sadness with a touch.
A heaven-made crevice in a world of night;
A deity enwrapped in mortal shape;
A God incarnate and anointed Christ,
While Humans watch, and wait, and pray, and hope,
And angels call towards still greater light.
by Alan Firth
Film
Review: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
by
Alan Firth
"It's the World, dear. Did you expect
it to be small?" - Mrs Beaver.
The Narnia books have been favourites of mine since
I was very young, and until now the only real picture I had of them was
in my own imagination. (I saw a cartoon version of The Lion, the
Witch and the Wardrobe many years ago, but it didn't make much of
an impression.) My imagination is a reasonably active one, but my
internal Narnia was always a sort of tame Narnia - perhaps a more English
Narnia, where the forests are tidy and the grass is cropped and the mountains
aren't actually all that big. The line drawings in the books,
though excellent, don't convey size very well.
I doubt if C.S. Lewis's imagination was so limited.
There are plenty of clues in the books - particularly the travel
stories The Horse and His Boy and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
- which suggest that Narnia is both large and dangerous. I have heard
that C.S. Lewis himself considered the Narnia books unfilmable.
He was wrong.
We now have a 'big Narnia'; a Narnia brought to life
by the combined skill and imagination of many people, and the result
is stunning. As it did in the Lord of the Rings films, New
Zealand provides a sort of 'Europe but older and wilder' landscape that
perfectly suits the nature of the story. But this isn't just a copy
of Middle-Earth; it's a world in its own right, and with its own character.
All the contrasting scenes are there, from the quiet clearing with
snow falling around an ancient lamp-post, to the magnificent castle of Cair
Paravel on the cliffs by the Eastern Ocean.
It's a world with its own set of inhabitants. All
of them are well-realised. Tumnus the Faun is charming, and Aslan
the Lion - who I understand is computer-generated - has just the right mixture
of power, sadness, compassion and joy. Technology has come far enough
so that even the talking animals look believable. The old saying
about the dangers of working with children or animals in theatre has
never been more effectively countered. (The wolves, incidentally,
are real.) And who would have thought that Father Christmas could
be portrayed in such a plausible and dignified way without the loss
of all the tradition that has grown up around the character.
Visual design is everywhere superb - both in the
big landscapes and battles, and in the little details such as Edmund's
Turkish Delight box. There are a number of nice little touches
which aren't in the book - watch Mr Tumnus's fire while he's contemplating
treachery.
And the story? The Narnia books have one huge
advantage over Harry Potter when it comes to film-making; they
are short. Very little has been left out, and some scenes
- including additional background and character development for the four
Pevensie children - are entirely new. The battle scenes are certainly
intense, but they don't take up as much of the film as the trailers suggested.
The story is well developed and well told, with competent actors
and some beautiful photography. Practically nothing anywhere in
the film seems out of place.
On the theological side, the film is also everything
it should be. It remains true to the book; God isn't mentioned
once in the whole thing, but the Christian themes of betrayal, forgiveness,
sacrifice and bravery are an integral part of the story, and no attempt
has been made to water them down. Scenes like Aslan's forgiveness
of Edmund - only seen from a distance, with no dialogue - are well portrayed.
I could write for a very long time about the many theological concepts,
obvious and subtle, embedded in the story - the fact that there are 'pagan'
creatures on both sides, Peter riding a unicorn, Aslan's establishment
of four thrones to rule over Narnia - but this review isn't
really the place to do it. All that matters for the moment is that
The Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe has been turned into a film, and it's been
done very well indeed.
Winning the Battle of Trafalgar: Strategies for a Christendom
in Crisis
by
Alan Firth
The 21st of October 2005 is the 200th anniversary
of one of the most important naval battles in history, and a decisive
engagement in the Napoleonic Wars, Horatio Nelson’s victory over the
combined French and Spanish fleet at Trafalgar off the Spanish coast.
I don’t know a lot about naval history, but
I have a particular interest in Trafalgar, because there’s a rumour
in my family (and I hasten to add that it’s entirely unconfirmed and
it may well be completely untrue) that I’m a descendant of Thomas Masterman
Hardy, who was captain of Nelson’s flagship the Victory, and
who was by the side of the famous admiral when he died.
It’s interesting that the Royal Navy at the
time of Trafalgar, rather like the Church of England, owed quite a
lot to the historical influence of a certain Henry the Eighth.
It’s also interesting that the Battle of Trafalgar makes a surprisingly
neat metaphor for some of the problems currently facing Christendom,
and gives some clues as to how those problems can be addressed.
(Incidentally, you can define Christendom in
different ways. If you use the word to mean Christianity as an
instrument of the state, it’s probably something we shouldn’t try to
rescue. But if you define Christendom as something like ‘a society
whose principles and cultural background are Christian’ then it’s something
that, although it seems to be in grave peril, should be revived if we
can possibly manage it. And Christianity has a long tradition
of things not being as dead as they seem!)
I’ll start with the basics. How do you
win a naval battle? By sinking (or disabling, of which more below)
the enemy ships. And how do you sink a ship? Well, the
underlying principle is that a sinking ship has lots of water in it,
and an otherwise identical but non-sinking ship hasn’t.
So it’s obvious; to win a naval battle, you
spray water on the enemy ships. Actually, this isn’t the best
strategy, for obvious reasons. Firstly, it’s slow. Secondly,
it presupposes a complete lack of reaction on the part of the bad guys.
You can sink a ship this way, but in practice it’s quite likely
that the enemy will be bailing faster than you can pour, and they may
well be doing sneaky things with firearms and boarding parties at the
same time.
But the ‘spray water on the enemy’ technique
is exactly the strategy adopted by large sections of the Christian
Church. I am referring to evangelisation by going round knocking
on doors, or by standing in public places and accosting innocent bystanders.
This is not in itself a bad thing. If it’s done properly, so that
it brings people into the Church rather than scaring them away, it’s
a most excellent thing. But it’s a mechanism for helping individual
souls, not for rebuilding Christendom as a whole. Evangelisation
of this sort is simply not big enough to affect the size of
the Church significantly. Water trickles into one side of the ship,
and a variety of pumps and leaks remove it from the other side, and
the ship stays pretty much where it was.
How do you really sink a ship? Yes, you
fill it with water, but the standard naval approach to doing this is
to knock a great big hole in the side of the hull. Then the water
will go in of its own accord, and the pumps won’t make much difference.
In other words, the Church needs the equivalent of a broadside of naval
cannon.
So what are our ‘big guns’? They come
in all shapes and sizes, and many of them are things we probably don’t
recognise as weapons. One that particularly comes to mind is the
combined art, literature and culture of the world.
A weapon? Yes, because it’s something
that, to use the analogy above, makes the water ‘go in of its own
accord’. All people are hugely influenced by their cultural background,
and many of the unstated assumptions that make life so difficult for
the Church are drummed into us by what we hear, what we read, and what
we watch, from a very early age. For example, there’s the materialist
philosophy so prevalent in the Western World; the idea that solid, measurable
things are ‘real’ and everything else is not. Christianity is based
on the opposite premise that the ultimate realities of the Universe are
subtle things which we can’t (yet) perceive directly. To become a
Christian, or to stay in the Christian Church, means unlearning much that
the secular world takes for granted.
But the ‘big gun’ of art and culture and literature
isn’t a weapon the enemy have created, but one they’ve captured.
Until recently, it was in Christian hands, and the European ‘worldview’
was a Christian one. The existence of God and eternal life, and
the divinity of Jesus, were assumed, and they still form the backdrop
to much of the culture we’ve inherited.
I happen to think this is a weapon we can win
back, if we realise how important it is to whichever side holds it.
A single J.K. Rowling or (dare I say it) Dan Brown would be a greater
asset to the Church than ten thousand people knocking on doors.
(And I, unlike some commentators, think that J.K. Rowling is largely
on our side already, whether she realises it or not.)
Regaining the place that the Church once held
as a major driver of the world’s culture is a long-term and large-scale
task, but there are two things we can keep in mind as worthwhile short-term
objectives. Firstly, those of us who do engage in one-on-one
evangelisation could keep an eye out for people with talents that can
benefit the whole Church. Commercial organisations ‘head-hunt’ for
capable people; why shouldn’t we do the same? (God apparently does
this, too; just look at the conversion of Paul.) Secondly, the Church
should encourage and support all sorts of cultural and artistic endeavours
arising from within it. This doesn’t just mean support for plays
and books and poetry and paintings about Christianity.
It’s enough that they have the Christian ‘worldview’, rather than the secular
one, lurking in the background.
Back to Trafalgar; sixty ships, over four thousand
guns, hours of fierce fighting. How many ships went down during
the battle? The surprising answer is: none. (Some
damaged vessels sank during the night, when a storm blew up.) It’s
hard to sink a wooden warship, but much easier to disable it. The
trouble with sailing ships is that putting thick armour plate around your
sails is a Very Bad Idea. So we have the irony that the very thing
that drives a sailing ship is also its greatest vulnerability.
The Christian Church has precisely the same
problem. A few months ago I had an article about Christian belief
published in the Otago Daily Times. It generated
a ‘decay trail’ of ten or fifteen Letters to the Editor. The
interesting thing was that only the first two or three had anything to
do with the content of the article. Then the correspondence degenerated
into a slanging match between the usual two groups.
On one side were the dogmatic atheists, highly
annoyed at the slightest mention of religion in public. They
pointed at the factual errors in the Bible and claimed that, since Christians
believe that every word of the Bible is literally true, all of Christian
belief is rubbish. On the other side, of course, were the extreme
Christian fundamentalists, beautifully supporting the atheist position
by making exactly those claims of Scripture.
The Bible is our array of sails and rigging.
We can’t do without it, and it works well as a propulsive mechanism
in certain sorts of weather. But it’s also horribly vulnerable.
The first ‘lesson from Trafalgar’ regarding the Bible is that it is
not a weapon. It guides and supports people who are
already Christian, but it’s not particularly useful (although some
of its content may well be) in trying to talk to those outside
the Church. I hope that most of us recognise that ‘the Bible is
true because it says so in the Bible’ is a circular argument. Faith
has to begin elsewhere.
But the big question is this: if the Bible is
‘the Word of God’, as so many people glibly claim, why is it so vulnerable?
Couldn’t an omnipotent God produce a Word without so many flaws and
glitches?
I think ‘the Word of God’ is a poor description.
It seems to imply that some aspect of God can be contained within Human
language, and set down in ink and paper. God is too big for this,
and too completely outside Human control. The Bible is (to quote
from a sermon I heard recently) a channel for the Word of God.
It’s a history of Humanity’s gradually increasing awareness of a God
so big and awesome that He can’t ever be contained within a book.
The fundamentalists and the atheists are both
wrong. The Bible isn’t everywhere a literal truth – as its authors
would be the first to point out, if given the opportunity. But
neither can it be dismissed as ‘wrong’ or irrelevant. Parts of it
are plain history, and the parts which aren’t literally true are
often the ones which contain truths deeper and more real than the merely
historical.
So the Bible has surface flaws, but a solid
foundation. But its vulnerability actually goes much deeper
than the visible cracks. There’s an obvious problem with the
descriptions above: ‘a channel for the Word of God’, and ‘a history
of Humanity’s increasing awareness’. Both of these things ought
to be ongoing, and the Bible is not. If it’s a channel, we’ve
shut the tap leading into it.
Why? Well, in the very early Church there
was an expectation that the Incarnation was an immediate precursor
to the end of the world and the Last Judgement. The writers of the
New Testament assumed (quite reasonably, in the circumstances!) that
a personal appearance of God as a Human, and something as traumatic
as the Crucifixion and Resurrection of that God, could only be the final
stage of a great plan. The Bible is very plain; the Second Coming
was expected within the lifetime of the contemporaries of Jesus.
Well, it didn’t happen . . . but, in a way,
it did. At Pentecost there was a Second Coming, but this
time God chose to be with Humanity in quite a different form, and in
a form that implied that God’s plan is actually not yet finished.
And if God’s plan is still developing, why then is Scripture frozen in
time, reflecting our relationship with God as it was two millennia ago?
The closing of the Biblical canon is actually
a result of the whims of history. A chap called Montanus claimed
to be the Paraclete, or the Holy Spirit, in about A.D. 172.
The young Church, dismayed at the prospect of a stream of controversial
words from would-be prophets, decided that the only writings acceptable
as New Testament Scripture were those of the Apostles, or people personally
connected with them. By about 200 there was rough agreement on
which books were Scriptural and which weren’t, although it was another
two centuries before the list was formally set in stone.
So the Church had good reasons for closing the
canon of Scripture. Nonetheless, I suspect that it was the wrong
decision. The whole point of the Holy Spirit is that God does
speak to individual people; our relationship with God continues to develop.
Yes, the Church would have found it very difficult to decide what was
really from God and what was just the ego-driven raving of individuals.
But the Church faced this task with the New Testament, as the Jewish
people faced it with their own body of Scripture. It wouldn’t
have been impossible; the Holy Spirit would, presumably, have guided
the compilers as well as the authors.
So the Bible we have is a dead Bible; the Word
of God up until the time when we stopped listening. It’s not surprising
that it comes increasingly into conflict with the rest of society, which
continues to develop. If we had never closed the canon, I suspect
that fundamentalism as we now know it simply wouldn’t exist, and the
atheists would be very short of ammunition.
What can be done? What the Royal Navy
did, eventually, was to adopt steam propulsion. (It still drives
the ships, but you can put armour plate around it.) Can we similarly
‘modernise’ the Bible, or is it too late? Are we so stuck in our
ways that we can’t do anything without causing more harm than good?
I am not suggesting that we edit bits
out of the Bible. As I said above, the fact that parts of Scripture
aren’t literally true doesn’t mean that they’re ‘incorrect’. Besides,
they are all now part of our history and our background – for better or
worse. What we can do – perhaps what we must do,
if Christendom is to survive – is to reopen the Biblical canon.
It won’t be an easy task. It will need
a great deal of agreement between the major Christian denominations,
and a great deal of time. (I suggest a probationary period of
at least a century during which new texts have the status
of, say, the Apocrypha rather than the main body of the Bible.)
But if we do nothing this problem is just going to get worse, and besides,
All Things Are Possible.
The issues I’ve talked about above are what
might be called ‘structural’; they’re important, but the key factors
in Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar fell into a different category; the
‘people’ category. The English didn’t win due to any
technological or numerical superiority, but because of the quality
of their commanders and sailors. Firstly, of course, was Nelson’s
inspired and inspiring leadership.
I don’t need to say much about leadership; there
is a long tradition in the Christian Church that, whenever we really
need a great leader, one will turn up. Often they are the most unlikely
people, and many of them (Martin Luther comes to mind) have had a greater
impact than you would think possible for a single, ‘ordinary’ person.
But one particularly notable factor in Nelson’s
leadership at Trafalgar was the amount of latitude he gave to his
individual captains to act as they saw fit, according to their own
initiative. They were all working towards the same end, but in
different ways. In other words, they knew how to separate tactics
(‘furl the larboard mizzenmast’) from strategic aims (‘stop Napoleon’).
This is something the Church has frequently
been very, very bad at doing. Throughout our history, we have
often slipped into the trap of treating rules and procedures as ends
in themselves, rather than means to an end. We’ve been particularly
prone to doing it with Scripture. We need to remember – as Jesus
Himself pointed out very plainly – that the rules are there to serve
us, rather than the other way around. So the commandment ‘keep the
sabbath’ is a tactical aim. It definitely doesn’t
mean ‘keep the sabbath even when you are causing more harm than you are
avoiding.’ Remember that Jesus broke this rule! He was following
the strategic aim: Love the Lord your God with all your heart,
and with all your mind, and with all your strength; and your neighbour
as yourself.
I’m definitely not saying that the rules are
irrelevant. In most circumstances they’re a very good guide,
and they give us a framework within which we can safely operate without
having to think too much. But a guide is precisely what
they are – they are there with the sole purpose of furthering the strategic
aims. Life’s complexities are such that there will sometimes be
situations when the rules are irrelevant or simply wrong. Then we
need to test our actions against the strategic aims. If we stick
to the letter of the law at all times we risk causing great harm to those
aims, and to ourselves as a Church.
The commanders of the English fleet knew how
to direct their ships and crews so that the strategic aim would be fulfilled,
and Napoleon learnt the usual lesson: don’t try to invade England!
But, in the end, the battle was fought and won by masses of sailors
and soldiers, inspired by Nelson’s famous signal before the battle:
‘England expects that every man will do his duty.’
This is the last lesson for us: just add ‘The
Church of’ to the beginning of Nelson’s message and, if you like,
substitute ‘person’ for ‘man’ and get into horrible linguistic tangles
over what to do about ‘his’. The thing the Church really needs
is a committed membership – not just the clergy and the paid staff,
but the ordinary people in the pews. We all need to remember that
Christianity is something very big and very serious. It isn’t a
hobby, or a pleasant social club for Sunday mornings.
All the decisions Christians make now, all the
things they do – and, more importantly, the things they don’t
do – are going to mould the future history of the world, and the permanent
and inextinguishable souls of many billions of people. The members
of the early Church, when it was a tiny, local organisation meeting
in private houses in the Middle East, were people just like us, and
there were only a few thousand of them, but remember what they did,
and what the Church for which they fought has become. We are all
significant.
I am no Nelson (not even a half-Nelson, although
possibly a small fraction of a Hardy), and I have no great grasp of
naval or Church strategy. I have undoubtedly missed many other
important points. But one more thing is clear from the Battle
of Trafalgar. Nelson was outnumbered and, on paper, outmatched
by the French and Spanish fleet. In other words, the facts and
statistics don’t mean a thing until the battle is fought. We can
win.
The
Magician's Nephew
Review
by Alan Firth
The earliest novel in the Narnia series will doubtless make
an excellent cinema film one day, but at first sight it isn't something
likely to translate well to the stage. There are all the talking
animals, of course, but the story also involves a flying horse, a whole
world being sung into existence by Aslan the lion, and scenes ranging
from a London street to the ruined, ancient world of Charn. Oh,
and there's the small matter of the characters making quick trips between
worlds by jumping into magic pools.
All of this, on stage? Well, the talented
people of the Dunedin City Baptist Church are evidently well acquainted
with the phrase All Things Are Possible. Their production
of The Magician's Nephew, which opened on the 16th of
September, is simply stunning. None of the things I mentioned
above have been omitted from the story. There were a couple
of pre-filmed video scenes (which were impressive in themselves), but
the magic pools were done 'live'. The play, scripted and directed
by Erina Caradus, is in fact very close to the original story, with
very little left out. The numerous scene changes were well choreographed,
with bridging scenes taking place in front of the curtains so that there
were hardly ever any interruptions to the flow of the story. Clever
scenery design helped; two or three times a door opened and then the walls
folded smoothly away to reveal the space beyond.
The animals were of course people in costumes,
but some effective acting combined with excellent makeup design made
this work very well. The two leopards, and a delightfully exuberant
rabbit, come particularly to mind. Aslan (Greg Brook) may not
have looked much like a live lion, but he played the part with a suitable
quiet dignity. The real highlight was John Rawstorn as Strawberry/Fledge
the horse (the first animal to appear); he kept up a stream of slightly-over-the-top
horsey noises and gestures throughout. And he grew wings . . .
And the humans shouldn't be forgotten either.
Mike Crowl played eccentric Uncle Andrew wonderfully well, but
most of the story rests on the two children, Digory (Josh Chignell)
and Polly (Dara Caradus), both of whom handled a huge amount of dialogue
without any evident difficulty. The other characters are too numerous
to mention, but Cherianne Parks made an impressively nasty Queen Jadis.
This is a church production, so the Christian
themes (although never explicitly identified as such) are there just
as C.S. Lewis intended them. But The Magician's Nephew
is a good story as well, and here it has been well told. There's
really nothing bad I want to say about this play, and many things about
it are wonderful. Go and see it!
'The Magician's Nephew' was
performed by Narnia Productions
in September 2005.
Harry
Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Review
by Kelvin Wright
I bought my copy of Harry
Potter and the Half-Blood Prince thirty seconds after it went
on sale. While the careful people queued neatly for their pre-ordered
copies, I was in the jostling mob taking their chances as the crates
of extra books were opened, and being both motivated and large, was
home by the fire reading my own copy while the queue was still gradually
shortening back at The Warehouse. Even though I have spent a
couple of decades asking the question “Why do people listen to the
stories they do?” the Harry Potter phenomenon is still a bit of a mystery
to me, even as I am swept up in it.
I found the latest episode a welcome return
to the style of the earlier Harry Potter books, after the somewhat
frenetic and dark Harry Potter and the Order Of the Phoenix.
Once again the action of the book is set largely within Hogwarts,
and the familiar rhythms of school life regulate the plot and make a
comfortingly domestic background against which the huge events of the
plot unfold. The story opens with the Muggle Prime Minister in
conversation with the Minister of Magic about the wizard war which is
rapidly spilling over into ordinary Muggle life. This gives a sense
of scale to the dastardly events with which Harry must struggle, but after
another scene-setting chapter outlining the relationship of the Malfoy
family and Severus Snape, the great events of the wizard world are relayed
only in reports from the wizard newspaper the Daily Prophet.
The main concern of the book is Harry’s quest
to find out exactly what Draco Malfoy is up to, but of course there
are other things happening, and as usual the various strands of seemingly-unconnected
events are found to be neatly plaited together at the end of the book.
Harry, Hermione and Ron have all aged a year since we last saw them
and as sixteen-year-olds they are now coping with the agonising but
delicious pitfalls of gender relationships. The romantic subplots
are appropriately intense and, for the characters, distracting and embarrassing.
I greatly admire the way J.K. Rowling can capture the particular preoccupations
of her characters as they age through the series. As usual, there
are some delightfully complex secondary characters and a whole range of
sharply-drawn bit players but the character who is eventually central
to this book is Severus Snape. He is as ever unfathomably paradoxical,
and even his apparently unambiguous role in the denouement leaves questions
that I am sure cannot be answered until the end of the next book in two
or three years’ time.
Much of this book is occupied with giving
the reader information – about Lord Voldemort in particular.
The method employed to do this is a series of meetings between Professor
Dumbledore and Harry in which Harry is given access to memories collected
by Dumbledore from various sources. The parallels between Voldemort
and Harry are clearly but subtly drawn and one of the great themes of
the whole series is demonstrated thereby – namely, choices. The choices
made by Harry and Voldemort in very comparable circumstances are what
separate them, but also, paradoxically, what bind them inextricably together.
One of the great joys of this book, as it
has been of the whole series, is J.K. Rowling’s inventiveness.
I had suspected, reading Harry Potter and the Order Of the
Phoenix, that perhaps this particular well was running a little
dry, but no, here in book six we have new spells, new characters, new
wonders from the wizarding joke shop run by Ron’s twin brothers which
made me laugh out loud at times. But these are not what give the book
its force and power. This is a book in which huge themes are dealt
with in ways which make no apologies or compromises for the sake of the
age of Rowling’s readership. She asks her young readers to front
up to six hundred pages of text and then leads them into discussions of
the nature of good and evil, choice and responsibility, selfishness and
selflessness, life and death. Millions of them respond. Given
their diet of carefully-constructed, educationally-correct, age-appropriate
fiction on the one hand, and mindless commercial multimedia entertainment
on the other, when they respond well to a book which entertainingly presents
them with the issues that they really want to know about, should I be so
surprised?
Click
on the link below for more on Harry Potter - but only if you've already read the book.
This article is about the ending of the novel, and it gives
away details of the plot.
Chronography
A
poem for the 125th Anniversary of St John’s Roslyn
A
stalk of candles flickers in the church.
I
sit within this fragile, wavering glow
And
gaze up to the still and silent dark
Of
time-worn timbers in the vaulted nave,
And
think I see faint glimmers; not of light,
But
more than light; an echoed memory,
A
rustling presence in the empty pews.
For
echoes fade past hearing, but remain;
And
so the marks of history abide
Just
past the pale of vision’s boundary.
Those
night-black windows glimmer with the rays
Of
forty thousand sunsets. Every pew
Creaks
silently beneath the phantom weight
Of
countless congregations past and gone;
Now
light as floating dust, yet each as real
As
that which filled the church with life and light
And
laughter just a few short hours ago.
A
hundred years and more of history;
A
thing so large I scarce can comprehend . . .
Until
I turn, and in my roving thoughts
I
glance the other way, into the future,
Stand
dizzy on the edge of Time’s abyss;
As
in a doorway, looking on the storm
And
grasping for the solid walls and warmth
Of
that small room behind me, while beyond
Is
emptiness and shadow, raging wind
And
mile on mile of cold and gale-swept moor.
But
not afraid; the path is dim, but straight,
The
emptiness illusion, and the gloom
No
more than ignorance and the unknown.
For
as we walk, we take the fire-glow with us
And
build new walls, and push away the night.
The
coming dawn illumes the way ahead,
An
ever-changing panoply of years;
And
every day and moment of that age
The
offspring of our words and actions now.
And
it may be, in distant future days,
That
songs are sung about our Early Church
In
English rich with new-invented words.
Ten
thousand billion praying, yearning souls
Spread
half across the jewelled Galaxy;
And
one may sit and think as I have thought,
And
see, deep in the shadows of the past,
Us,
in faith's timeless continuity.
by Alan Firth
The Theology of Star Wars
The first
two 'prequel' Star Wars films have been justly criticised
for their faults, of which I think the greatest is undue complexity.
The original Star Wars was a very simple story,
and actually a very traditional one ('simple peasant rescues princess
from evil wizard and overthrows nasty baron') despite the spaceships.
Episodes I and II, however, would have been better titled Star
Politics. Their plots do actually make sense - if
you know some of the background information, which isn't in the films,
and if you have plenty of time to think about it.
One gets the impression that the writers
and producers were more interested in including lots of visually
dramatic set-pieces (pod-racing comes particularly to mind; think
of Ben Hur with turbojet engines instead of horses) than in
telling a coherent story.
However, I think the recently-released
Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is a considerably
better film than its two predecessors. Why? It still
has the complex political background and the implausibly frenetic
action sequences. At times it's very difficult to maintain your
'suspension of disbelief'. General Grievous, the leader of the
Separatist droid armies, looks very impressive with four whirling lightsabres
gouging holes in the floor. Then he politely slows down when
Obi-Wan Kenobi (who only has the one lightsabre) is within striking
range. And R2-D2 seems to be armour-plated, indestructible and
highly mobile, quite unlike the droid we know and love from the three
original films.
The difference in Episode III is
that the story isn't about the politics or even
the battles. They're just background - annoying at times,
but sometimes fun to watch and always technically clever. This
film is about the Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker and the process by
which he becomes the evil tyrant Darth Vader.
The important point is that people
don't become evil by a single decision. Near the end of
his allegorical tale The Pilgrim's Regress C.S. Lewis
writes that we fall into evil ways by many small steps, that there
is a point somewhere beyond which we cannot return, and that - crucially
- we cannot see except in retrospect where this point lies. Episode
III is all about how this slow journey from good to evil can happen,
and it portrays it fairly well. It's also of interest that Anakin's
ultimate motives are mostly good all the way through, although he's being
manipulated and misled. Anakin wants to be powerful, at first,
so that he can prevent evil.
The problem is that he sets up one
good thing as an absolute standard - as, for example, Nazi Germany
did with patriotism. In effect it becomes an idol. Anakin
stops judging each individual action by its own context and consequences,
and adopts the fatal principle of the end justifying the means.
The teachings of Jesus are clear on this point; look
at things on a case-by-case basis. Thus He heals people
on the Sabbath - breaking one of the Ten Commandments - because He
knows that the rules are there for their effects, not for their words.
As Obi-Wan tells Anakin late in Episode III, 'Only the Sith
deal in absolutes.'
And so Anakin
makes his journey, each step seemingly small and safe, towards the
Dark Side. It was Anakin's love for his mother which began this
journey, and in the end it is his possessive love for Padmé
which destroys her. (There are echoes here of the novel Till
We Have Faces, particularly if you remember that Darth Vader spends
the rest of his life behind a mask as did Orual.) Anakin's real
failing isn't a hunger for power; it's an inability to trust. He
fears for those he loves, and he tries to take all the responsibility
engendered by that fear onto himself.
As Yoda (the
little green chap with the big ears) said in Episode I: 'Fear leads
to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering.'
But, as Christianity tells us, it
doesn't end there. Paul writes in his letter to the Romans:
'Suffering leads to endurance; endurance builds character; character
leads to hope, and hope does not disappoint us.' And so also
in Star Wars: there are another three films after Episode
III, and the climax of the last film, Return of the Jedi,
sees Darth Vader turn against the Emperor to save the life of his son,
Luke Skywalker, who was born amidst the pain and destruction that
Vader caused in Episode III.
The good thing about evil, you see,
is that it's ultimately destructive for the person who wields it
as well as those in the vicinity. That means that there will
always be a point at which someone like Darth Vader realises that
there is a better way; that his current path simply isn't sustainable.
And the message of Christianity - and of Star Wars
- is that there is always a way back. No matter what you've
done, or how twisted you've become; God offers complete, unconditional
forgiveness and healing. Darth Vader killed billions of people
during his reign of terror, and yet Luke was able to put all of that
behind him, and see only the redeemed Anakin as he was in the last moments
of his life.
It's very hard for people to accept
this part of Christian belief, as the continual calls for harsher
prison sentences make clear. But the Gospels are very firm
on the subject; God forgives us, absolutely, at the slightest opportunity,
and we have to forgive each other in the same way.
This isn't to say that we can blithely
use evil as a tool because we know its effects won't last. Darth
Vader's repentance doesn't bring those he has killed back to life.
It doesn't restore the Old Republic . . . but it does clear
the way for the founding of a New Republic. In
some sense, every decision we make is eternal, and so are all the scars
we inflict on ourselves and on others. But they are scars, not
wounds; for God's eternity is greater, and all wounds will heal with
time. Evil, by its very nature, cannot endure. The
Star Wars series ends with the spirits of Obi-Wan, Yoda
and Anakin Skywalker reunited, together, and at peace with themselves
and with their Galaxy Far, Far Away.
by
Alan Firth
Copyright Notice
Copyright in the
items on this page is held by their respective authors. You
may use this material for private, non-commercial use
only. Please do not make multiple copies
of these items, redistribute them on the internet, or use
them to make money. If you would like
to make this material available to others, please tell
them about the St John's website or add a link to this page
from your own website.
|
