Jacobean journey

It sounds like mission impossible. To celebrate this year’s 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, the RSC set itself the task of mounting a play about the controversies surrounding the translation. A drama, therefore, entirely lacking in drama. No action or spectacle, no romance or comedy, no surprise twists or last-minute poisonings. Just people talking. And for David Edgar, who accepted the commission, this was part of the attraction. ‘A meeting between people who are unrelated but share a common purpose,’ he tells me, ‘can be as exciting and vivid and active as that great staple of drama, the family meal. Even sitting around writing a letter to a relative is a recognisable form of human behaviour.’

We meet in a break from rehearsals. He’s in his early 60s, lean and tall, with a literary stoop, and he dresses in the featureless costume of the left-wing lifer. Personally, his air is kindly, pensive, faintly monastic, and he speaks in lengthy, fluting screeds of rumination. His bone-white skull, though naturally bald, might have been razed clean deliberately to encourage the chilly blasts of nature to spur his mind to greater feats of industry and virtue.

Writing the play’s dialogue, he tells me, was like creating a foreign language. ‘It would feel ridiculous for the translators to talk in contemporary vernacular while they’re debating how to render “In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth.” On the other hand, it would be difficult, and grating, to spend an evening hearing people saying “thee and thou” and “hadst and doeth”. So I’ve tried to compromise by keeping the vigour of Jacobean English and some of its formulations. The actors are neither speaking contemporary English nor are they speaking what could sound like cod-Shakespeare.’