From the Memoirs of Pontius Pilate (Eric Bentley)
I swear I didn’t plan it, but I did happen to find myself reading a play about Jesus’ death on Good Friday. What luck.
My own rule is that I reserve judgment for playwrights until after I’ve experienced three of their plays, and while these three plays of Eric Bentley’s are bound no doubt because they share thematic similarities I think I have a good sense of what he is all about: not accepting the official account of things, questioning authority, and making the dangerous (but right), choice.
In this way he is an interesting playwright, but stylistically he’s not exciting to me, almost certainly owing to a lack of comedy and an infusion of self-seriousness on his part. Not that it isn’t well earned. I suppose I will have to content myself that Bentley is merely an excellent story-teller who derives interesting, deep characters with strong senses of morality and difficult choices to make, and must accept that he can’t always be riotous on top of all that.
None of that address this play, which I enjoyed the most of the three plays of his I read. From the Memoirs of Pontius Pilate can most succinctly be described as a dark, gritty reboot of Jesus. A Batman Begins for the Lord of Lords, if you will.
We begin with an old Pilate starting a chapter on the events surrounding Jesus’ (Yeshua) death and the cult that appeared after it. In a brilliant move the play is said to be recreations of spies who took notes during what were thought to be private conversations. In this way Pilate subtly enforces the supremacy of the Roman state and lays plain the obvious failure of any attempt by the Jewish people at revolution.
Yeshua is plagued by a question: is the Messiah and wouldn’t he know it. He swings between thinking he is and he isn’t throughout the work and points out, as is historically accurate, the great number of people claiming to be the Messiah concurrently and in the past. He’s depicted as a “hick preacher from a hick town” though one that has amassed a following.
A following outclassed by Barabbas a zealot and guerilla fighter who Yeshua tries to call Messiah before having it turned back on him. Through Judas, here depicted as a friend to both though who favors Barabbas, they convince Yeshua to join his following with the fighters and so force the Jewish puppet government to back revolution, in the hopes that Rome will fear the larger numbers and surrender. This is destroyed immediately.
By scene three Yeshua is in jail and has a choice to make: does he maintain that he is the Messiah, and die (in failure) or does he slink back to his home, and potentially depress his people? Through many conversations people debate the underpinnings and philosophies of any number of these decisions, before Yeshua ultimately decides to let himself be killed and so preserve the Jewish fighting spirit. After his death, says Pilate, a friend claims that he rose from the dead and so begins Christianity.
I have little to say about this that I didn’t say yesterday about Galileo: it’s wordy, it’s powerful, it’s moving, and it’s not right for our company. This show is a great example at the strength of a simple, clear question: when is it more valuable to die than to live? And in a world of complication, especially fictional plot complication, that’s a good lesson to bear in mind.
