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Love that lasts a thousand years
Eternal Love
Malvern Theatres
**** ABELARD and
Heloise are legendary lovers from 12th
Century France whose names may be familiar to many and whose story
strikes a fascinating chord with a modern audience. The pair shared a love of learning and both had
exceptional intellects, so when the spark of attraction caught Abelard’s
soul, he offered to become a personal tutor to Heloise who had been
raised by her uncle Canon Fulbert. Their passion led to an intense sexual
relationship and later to a pregnancy. It caused a massive scandal and
deep shock in the deeply religious culture that surrounded them. Fulbert
is so incensed that he wants to kill Abelard; Abelard tries to appease
him by offering to marry Heloise, albeit secretly. Heloise, though, does not want to marry and
become a wife, she prefers the passion and excitement of being a
mistress, she wants love not wedlock! She also fears that a marriage
will destroy Peter Abelard’s career prospects – with his outstanding
intellect and abilities, he is destined to become a cardinal and
possibly even a future Pope. Nonetheless Abelard persuades Heloise to
enter into a secret marriage and he tries unsuccessfully to convince her
uncle of the benefits of secrecy. The marriage in no ways brings their troubles to
an end; they have enemies who want to expose and humiliate them, so
Abelard ends up hiding Heloise in a convent, while he himself is
attacked by a bunch of thugs, cousins of Bishop Fulbert, and is
violently castrated. Their subsequent separation led to correspondence
that has been a part of their ‘heritage’ to future generations. The
tragic story of these ill-fated lovers is the subject of Howard
Brenton’s play ‘Eternal Love’ running for a week at the Malvern Festival
Theatre.
Michael Taylor’s design provides a bright
backdrop that is brilliantly flexible for a play with multiple short
scenes that were smoothly linked with the highly effective music played
by William Lyons and his fellow musicians with a number of period
instruments. This visual and musical background was
complemented by some beautiful costumes that, especially in the court
scenes, were visually stunning. The play provides the audience with a
considerable amount of philosophy, theology and debate. This potentially
weighty material is wonderfully counterbalanced by two strong elements:
the humour and the human elements of the story. The humour is illustrated by the way in which
very quickly after the most gruesome moment in the play when Peter
Abelard is castrated, humour, albeit slightly black humour, is made of
this tragedy by the mad second monk and Lotholf and Alberic. The human
element pervades the play too: the young nuns spying on Abelard and
Heloise in the chapel with their very natural curiosity are typical of
countless human and humorous elements that counterbalance any potential
heaviness provided by the philosophical debate and conflicts. Peter Abelard and Heloise were brilliantly portrayed by David Sturzaker and Jo Herbert, and likewise Sam Crane’s Bernard de Clairvaux maintained a powerful mystical presence. These strong performances were strongly complemented by Julius D’Silva as King Louis VI and Edward Peel as Bishop Fulbert, Heloise’s uncle. There is a large cast that mostly operate as an ensemble throughout the performance. The other cast members provided a strong set of
supporting characters and the delivery of the text was excellent: the
words were clearly spoken, the balance of voices a delight to the ear
and the pace of the show very well managed. The exploration of the
passionate relationship between Abelard and Heloise managed to avoid any
excessive sentimentality: this was helped by the roles of Denise, Peter
Abelard’s sister and Mother Helene at the Convent of Ste Marie
Argenteuil, as well as by the humour lacing the show.
Howard Brenton’s play presents us with a major
conflict of culture and philosophies represented mainly by Peter Abelard
and Heloise on the one hand as the new freethinkers who emphasise the
importance of reason, logic and meaning, and by Bernard on the other
hand, who is somewhat caricatured, as the representative of revelation,
faith and the traditional acceptance of the authority of Scripture and
the Church. This conflict comes to a head at the Council of
Sens at which it might seem as though Bernard de Clairvaux is the
winner. However as the play draws to a close and Abelard has been
excommunicated from the church and his writings banned and burnt, and as
it seems as though Abelard has lost completely, Heloise reveals the
survival of his ‘autobiography’, the ‘History of My Sorrows’, along with
the letters they exchanged over the years; by producing a 21st
Century Penguin edition of the same, she effectively delivers the
verdict of history that Peter Abelard’s rationalism and freethinking has
become after many generations the ultimate winner. The play opens with the cast moving out into the
auditorium to engage with the audience and greet them with warmth and
friendliness; the play then concludes with a song and dance that is
performed by the whole cast as an ensemble which seems to communicate
that actually the human, the joyful, the communal acceptance and
toleration of everyone in our humanness is to be celebrated as a victory
over the dry and brutal contentiousness of philosophical and theological
debate. The play ends with an upbeat sense that we have
transcended the dry and ugly contentiousness that resulted in the
destruction of Peter Abelard and Heloise’s passionate love affair. This
is a wonderful, thought-provoking and lively play that is to be highly
recommended.
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