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More than Murder in the Cathedral

If you were one of the many disappointed theatre-goers who weren’t able to get tickets to last week’s run of Murder in the Cathedral, the first thing to know is that you did not miss out on seeing a play. Rather, you missed a nearly indescribable fusion of poetry, performance art and religious experience. But Cherwell, as always, is here to try to describe the indescribable to you.

Had you gotten one of the coveted tickets to the performance, you would have entered Christ Church Cathedral to the sound of echoing voices and a chorus of medieval women would have appeared all around you singing and chanting.

You would have waited breathless with them for Thomas Becket’s arrival and stately walk down the nave. It would probably have taken you the first twenty minutes of the performance to adjust to T.S. Eliot’s mix of verse, dialogue and bizarre poetic imagery that reverberated off the Cathedral’s vaulted ceilings.

But any difficulty in hearing what was actually being said would prove well worth the experience of witnessing Thomas Becket’s arrival, temptation and death in the only Oxford chapel that evokes the medieval grandeur of Canterbury Cathedral itself.

Once you let go of expecting the performance to be like any other play you may have seen, Murder in the Cathedral mesmerized with its eclectic mix of history, language and devotion. When Becket is ultimately stabbed to death at the feet of Christ Church’s gilded altarpiece, you’d likely stand up with the rest of the audience, craning your neck to get a better view.

The hollow cries of grief, red rimmed eyes and tears of the chorus would yield the feeling that you are not watching a performance, but witnessing an event whose meaning is just beyond your grasp. As the lights fade into the black at the end, you would sit in silence before applauding, unwilling to break the spell of a different level of experience created through the performance.

Like medieval mystery plays, Murder in the Cathedral is the modern equivalent of a ritualistic reenactment of a historical and spiritual moment. Unlike most performances of mystery plays, it succeeds in captivating and transporting one to Canterbury in 1170. In a proudly secularized culture, can Eliot’s play about spiritual temptation and martyrdom speak to a society that predominantly views God as a bedtime story for adults? Last week’s production answered that question with a resounding yes.

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