If you were hoping to see Murder in the Cathedral next week, then make other plans. The show has sold out weeks before its opening performance. This could be for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the show’s cast of nineteen has massively oversized families. Or T.S. Eliot fans have turned out in droves to see his rarely performed play. Or it could because director Tom Littler has returned to Oxford with a cast of students and professionals to stage unprecedented performance in an unprecedented space.
Next week, Thomas Becket will die nightly in Christ Church Cathedral, brought to life by Eliot’s metered verse and the Cathedral’s echoing nave. While an Oxford student reading English, Tom Littler directed dozens of shows, ranging from Shakespeare to A Streetcar Named Desire. But his vision of putting on Murder in the Cathedral while studying at Oxford was never realized. Years later, his dream to stage Eliot’s play at Christ Church is coming true through a cast and production team of both current and former Oxford students.
During his daily nine-hour rehearsals, Littler gently interrupts the rhythmic dialogue of the Chorus; ‘Sometimes scenes come at you like a tiger, don’t they?’. Littler doesn’t even need to raise his voice or get out of his chair to command the focus of his hybrid cast of students and professionals. In bringing together such a diverse ensemble, Littler as achieved a rare symbiosis: ‘The professionals raise the bar for the students and the students’ energy rubs off on the professionals’. The results are apparent enough in rehearsal; a unified and energized cast that can do justice to what Littler calls ‘Eliot’s masterpiece’.
Littler recalls his time as a student director fondly and with a touch of disbelief; ‘Oxford is a playground for [student] directors. You get to sink your teeth into huge plays. As a professional, you can’t pick what you do. You do plays that aren’t masterpieces. There aren’t that many flawless plays but I was able to direct many of them as a student’.
In returning to Oxford, Littler has the chance to direct a masterpiece again. He looks at Eliot’s play like he’s looking at a sacred text. He is one of a dying breed of directors who reveres the text rather than seeing in it only an opportunity to put his directorial signature on someone else’s work. In stepping beyond of a theatre world that perhaps loves theatrical spectacle more than loving plays themselves, Littler’s Murder revives not only his undergraduate vision but the lost art of knowing a masterpiece when you see one.
