Some 40 years ago or so, Caryl Churchill, who was just beginning to put herself on the theater map, joined venerable director Max Stafford Clark and his Joint Stock Theatre Company to see what kind of project they might come up with. In 1976 they decided on a play concerning the Oliver Cromwell-led English Civil Wars, which raged from 1642 to 1660.
After much research into available records (quite a bit and some quite valuable) and workshop development, they emerged with Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, which New York Theatre Workshop produced in 1991 and have now handed over to frequent NYTW director Rachel Chavkin for what is a fair-to-middling, actually puzzling revival.
Perhaps it was felt that a close look back at the historical couple of agitated British decades—when Charles I was challenged and eventually beheaded with young Charles II looking on—would resonate with today’s stateside political climate. It doesn’t.
The result today is a glance at those combustible years when the English population, also at times in conflict with the Scots, revolted against the monarchy and then, as is often the case with revolutionaries, devolved into unreconcilable factions. In this case, they were known as Levellers, Ranters and Diggers, the last group often centered in Buckinghamshire. Many of them began thinking radically in regard to changed religious attitude—“There is no sin but what men think is sin,” one figure insists with no fear of being considered heretical.
The Churchill-Stafford-Clark intentions may be commendably sincere, but the result—surely for a contemporary audience—isn’t, uh, on that level. The work comes off as a mixture of lecture, oratorio, sketches, and panel discussion. Certainly, what the creators hoped to accomplish seems to have fallen shy of the mark, not to mention occasionally elusive.
The material is intriguing, not the least of it the Putney Debates, held in Surrey during 1647 when a group, moderated by Cromwell, discussed developing a new constitution but none of the participants could agree on whom would be eligible to vote. It was helpful that the debate minutes were kept, then lost and only rediscovered in 1890 and apparently used here.
Churchill and Clark set out Light Shining in Buckinghamshire in two acts of scenes that focus on many aspects of the civil war interlude, which explains the CliffNotes quality of the piece. By fade-out, it feels as if a survey course was offered that only leaves a sense that not enough—whether an individual scene is quick or lengthy (a destitute mother has to abandon her infant, a butcher rails at privileged customers, the Putney Debates carry on)—has been covered substantially.
The production problem is compounded by the frequent difficulty of following the arguments. Many are abstruse, particularly the Putney Debates. This account, at least in part, for the entire Light Shining in Buckinghamshire script to be delivered as surtitles on an upstage digital strip that set designer Riccardo Hernandez supplies—with not much else within NYTW’s striking exposed-brick walls.
Isabella Byrd does offer interesting lighting designs, and Mikaal Sulaiman equips the actors with microphones, not unlike the anachronistic effect so prominently employed some years back for the Spring Awakening musical. The appropriated choice proves unhelpful.
Chavkin, who does know how to conjure atmosphere (cf. her three radically different looks for Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812), does her best to enliven the proceedings and is admirably aided by the doubling of Rob Campbell, Matthew Jeffers, Mikéah Ernest Jennings, Gregg Mozgala, Evelyn Spahr and the venerable Vinie Burrows.
At the end of the day, however—at the end of the sometimes seemingly long, long day—the history lesson dispensed isn’t adequate to the time spent imparting it.
Light Shining in Buckinghamshire opened May 7, 2018, at New York Theatre Workshop and runs through June 3. Tickets and information: nytw.org
