Kate Chisholm looks forward to The People’s Passion on Radio 4 which explores the role of the cathedral in a modern, secular world
‘We began by wanting to do something about cathedrals and the life that goes on within them,’ recalls Christine Morgan, head of religion and ethics at BBC Radio. That was about 18 months ago, when not much attention was being paid to these great beacons of British history and belief. But by coincidence (or perhaps divine intervention) cathedral stories have been hitting the front pages in recent months after the tortuous attempts by St Paul’s to extricate itself from Occupy London and its battle with money, capitalism and the workings of the City. New questions are being asked: not so much what do cathedrals do but why are they still here? Do they still have a vital, living purpose in such a secular society?
‘At first the idea was to create five new dramas for Radio 4 in Holy Week,’ says Morgan. The People’s Passion would follow the events leading up to Easter through the life of a fictional cathedral, telling the story recorded in the Gospels but also revealing hidden aspects of these extraordinary communities, not of the world yet very much involved with it at its most real, most tangible, most elemental. We may think that cathedrals are cut off, secluded and rather precious but, says Morgan, ‘they have to deal with everybody’, not just the people who visit as tourists, spectators, believers, but also those who come to seek something they’re not quite sure of.
Wherever you are in the UK you will not be far from a spire (or maybe three) on the horizon, a vaulted nave, the impressive physical presence of one of these ancient buildings, and of the daily life that goes on there, from Morning Prayer through the Hours to Compline. They draw you in, demanding attention, offering sanctuary, a chance to retreat for a few moments into a different atmosphere, space, setting. But they can also be intimidating, their difference creating the feeling that ‘you have to know the password’ before being allowed in.
In the dramas we meet Ellen, who works in the shop; she doesn’t believe, has a troubled daughter, finds no comfort in the cathedral. Callum has joined the volunteer choir. He’s unemployed, a bit hopeless with a ghastly girlfriend. Will music be his salvation? Samir has arrived with candles, a bundle of cloth, a few grains of rice, wanting to remember his recently deceased father. He’s not understood, not welcome.
Very few clerics make an appearance in the plays, which pay little attention to Church of England politics, clerical intrigues, Close life. ‘They’re not exactly Trollope,’ says the writer Nick Warburton, wryly. After visiting Chichester, Gloucester, Norwich and Ely, he became more interested in attempting ‘to capture the sound of the cathedral at rest’. What can these stones tell us when everyone has gone and all that is left is the building? The stories that emerge might seem quite small, but in an unguarded moment you, too, might betray someone, have an experience beyond the norm, feel something new. ‘They aren’t small at all.’ As the often cantankerous narrator (a brilliant David Bradley) mutters, this is ‘the space between God and people. Between heaven and earth. A borderland …This is where I feel the breath of God.’
It’s a theme that’s picked up by the Archbishop of Canterbury as he talks to the philosopher John Gray in one of the ‘Cathedral Conversations’ that also form part of The People’s Passion project. Rowan Williams and Gray stand talking together in the great nave at Canterbury ‘without chairs today so you get a sense of the huge scale of it and the clear glass in the windows …The nave gives you the message you don’t have to fill the space …You come in here to be questioned.’
Questioning is at the heart of The People’s Passion. In the very first play, Coming to Jerusalem, Ellen picks up one of the stones used to represent Christ’s tomb in the Easter Garden (created anew each year as a representation of the Passion story), and smashes a medieval window. Why? ‘Because I’m angry. This place. All this. So pleased with itself. It’s a sham.’ It’s shocking to hear this. What begins gently, soothingly, perhaps knowingly, is shattered. Nothing is as it seems; no one is quite so simple, so ordinary. ‘They spend hundreds and thousands just to stop it crumbling,’ says Ellen. Why?
Yet something strange has been happening. It’s as if cathedrals are beginning to find their voice and answer back. The People’s Passion began quite small, an in-house Radio 4 production, but as the plays began to emerge, the project started to explode, Morgan explains. ‘We began to see that the story emerging was so much bigger than we originally thought.’ The five discussions with Rowan Williams, Giles Fraser, Salley Vickers, Loyd Grossman, Lord Wallace (who sang at the Coronation) were developed to complement the ideas being explored in the plays by Nick Warburton and his producer Jonquil Panting. Special music was commissioned to be woven through all five of the plays, but also (and this is a first for Radio 4) to be taken out into the community as a choral piece that could be performed by choirs everywhere, not just for radio but as a community project.
An anthem has been created, words by Michael Symmons Roberts, music by Sasha Johnson Manning. Roberts’s text is quite different but ‘takes on the shape of the plays as they were when he first read them’, explains Panting, who has painstakingly sculpted the soundscape of the dramas to conjure up the vast, echoey spaces of a gothic nave. You can hear snatches of this atmospheric, haunting music throughout but also take part in performing (and listening to) the whole work in venues across the UK and throughout the world after a campaign organised jointly by Radio 4 and BBC Local Radio.
Professional and amateur choirs have been practising the anthem since January, ready for performances in situations as different as the Tesco car park in Purley and the Anglican cathedral in Mombasa. On Easter morning the anthem in its entirety will be broadcast from Manchester Cathedral. The People’s Passion is taking Radio 4 out to meet a new audience while at the same time bringing people in to the cathedral experience.
There’s a moment in one of the plays when Callum is rehearsing his solo. He gets through it, beautifully, and then asks James, the director of music, ‘That was it. Wasn’t it?’ His words echo through the cathedral nave, but also through the series: ‘That was it. Wasn’t it?’
The People’s Passion is on Radio 4 and Radio 4 Extra from 2 April to 8 April. The anthem is being performed by 138 choirs throughout Holy Week.
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