Theatre

Emperor and Galilean

Alan Hindle | Monday 20 June, 2011 17:01

Left: Julian the Apostate (Andrew Scott) burning the bones of John the Baptist in used scene due to fire regulations.

In Emperor and Galilean, Caesar Julian, last pagan ruler of the Roman and Byzantium empires gives an impassioned and possibly drunk/drugged speech to the citizens of Constantinople. All shall be free to worship as they wish, and the suffocating, false morality of the Christian centuries shall be washed away in a tidal wave of free love, man, and, like, creative thought and tie-dye parties and does anybody have some crisps or something, or maybe some brownies?
Julian’s reign lasted only 18 months, but, man, they must have been fun ones.
Obviously, I’m paraphrasing. Norwegian author Henrik Ibsen was never much for the booze and magic cupcakes. But the play, rarely performed, is a remarkable debate on repressive religion versus sensuality and humanism. It must have been even more so when first written and read. Though it maybe didn’t help its reputation to be Hitler’s favourite play.
The National Theatre’s cast for Emperor and Galilean is huge, the designer’s scale monumental, but performances are uneven and where the play works best is often in its smaller, more spare moments, such as when Julian’s friends wrestle with his conflicting faiths. The endlessly revolving, rising and falling semi-circular set, sometimes a mountain, sometimes the underground caves of perhaps Cappadocia, are fun but hardly do more than point up the large budget. Filmic but cheesy, anachronistic projections distract from the brilliantly nuanced story and issues being explored. Other times the spectacle and grandeur works beautifully, such as when it illustrates the opulence of Byzantine civilisation. The initial procession of the emperor Constantius II (presented as a paranoid dwarf in red velvet robes, played by the charismatic and hilarious Nabil Shaban) surrounded and carried upon his throne by a Greek Orthodox procession in glowing white and gold silks and togas has an otherworldly, almost faerie tale look about it. ,
Nabil Shaban is excellent as the mercurial Caesar, as is Ian McDiarmid in the role of Maximus the Eleusinian mystic resolutely carrying the torch of the enlightening Mysteries. It’s hard now to see him as anything other than evil Emperor Palpatine, yet, weirdly, that cultural reference only serves to make the character more believable. Darth Vader’s sugar daddy is, to my (admittedly atheist) mind, allowed to be the raging voice of reason. Andrew Scott as Julian, however, is constantly shrill and frantic, his voice breaking with pubescent angst for three and a half hours.
In Ibsen’s play Julian is a fanatical yet wavering, unbalanced Christian, who falls in with the pagan intelligentsia and gradually renounces his faith in favour of classic philosophy and Pythagorean rites. He rails against Christianity’s hypocrisies, scoring points against its oppression of reason and pleasure. Eventually he collapses into the emotionally hollow core of hedonism and madness. In reality Julian died at the end of a Persian spear, so Ibsen took liberties, but what is so marvellous about the script is that you are never sure of the playwright’s loyalties. There must have been pressure to make the play acceptable to audiences of the time, but in the shouts of lingering soothsayer Maximus, blows continue to be struck for an alternate viewpoint.
The Romans were obsessive bureaucrats. They kept meticulous records, detailing that between the creation of the Christian religion and its eventual inheritance of the empire, there were only five years of actual, official persecution of the followers of the Galilean. Most of the martyrs had to beg their bemused oppressors to kill them. On the other hand, once the equally meticulous Christians gleefully took power they gleefully noted the temples and multitudes of pagans set fire to. In fact, Rome likely fell not because of decadence but because the church was only interested in ruling a heavenly realm and not an earthly one. Constantinople, created by the emperor Constantine as his New Rome in the east, remained, after the west fell to the so-called barbarians, as the light of knowledge in a dark age precisely because it managed to stay open-minded. Emperor and Galilean doesn’t quite manage the same double-bladed knife-edge feat, but in its own way achieves something almost as remarkable. Despite lasting almost as long as the Byzantine empire the show never once drags. And, for an Ibsen? That is nothing short of a miracle.

Emperor and Galilean runs at the National Theatre until 10 Aug. Show is approximately three and half hours long, including interval. 0207 452 3000. Waterloo, Temple and Charing Cross stations.

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