It’s 1609 and King James wants a new, audibly pleasurable, King-friendly Bible, stat. Sir Henry Savile, a clear-eyed translator played by the potent Cyrus Lane, leads three British scholars through a new translation. Before embarking on a day of godly work, he charms his troops and his keen son and scribe Willie (the ebullient 郝邦宇 Steven Hao) with a marvellous and rare pineapple he’s rented.
The scholars contemplate every word, bickering in witty banter and Monty Python-era accents. Their personal moralities and the needs of the King clash with the text they’re creating. Was Joseph a perfect man for accepting Mary, or was he just a man?, they ponder. Sir Henry stifles his son’s burgeoning talents and prioritizes work over family. In anachronistic asides, the other scholars dish about how they connect more to their work than their wives. Their personal issues visibly shape the text they are translating.
Thus begins one of two new commissions for this year’s Stratford Festival, and the only one to debut on the Studio Theatre stage: Governor General Award-nominee Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman’s The King James Bible Play. It’s directed by Nina Lee Aquino — the National Arts Centre’s triple Dora Award-winning artistic director — who gives the play a comic charge, with plenty of physicality that lets the performances shine without leaving an overbearing director’s stamp on the production.
Corbeil-Coleman’s best-known plays, such as Guarded Girls and Scratch, centre contemporary young women circling grief, inheritance, and intergenerational trauma. It might seem like a surprise, then, that The King James Bible Play opens with five men centuries ago — but it turns out that the intergenerational trauma in this case stretches back about 417 years.
Just as the scholars’ surprising personalities come into focus — the histrionic Sir George Abbott (Ryan Wilkie); the quietly proud John Perrin (Michael Spencer-Davis); and the downright quirky John Bois (Gray Powell) — Act I ends. After intermission, it’s the present day. The men give way to a five-woman theatre troupe. Michelle Ramsay’s lighting and Robin Fisher’s long table and floor-to-ceiling bookshelf of the first act’s Renaissance study remain almost unchanged when it transforms into the troupe’s rehearsal room.
A metatheatrical mirror structure reveals itself: the women are writing the play we have just watched. Martie, an exhausted small-theatre director played by the inimitable Deborah Hay, struggles to deliver a lagging production. She’s under pressure to create a saleable play, and to top it off her lead actor leaves the troupe. Instead, she recruits her daughter Han (Vivien Endicott-Douglas), an impassioned feminist and PhD candidate, to join actors Ron (Liz Der), Anna (Ange Lo), and Cath (Sara Topham) and to help the show ignite.
The troupe improvises the lives of the men, inverting the Renaissance convention in which only men were allowed to play women. The King James Bible Play becomes thick with theatre-world jokes: Martie interrupts to mock Anna’s stiff arm, while Cath’s histrionics become a parody of prima donnas. Han challenges Martie to make room in the play-within-a-play for women’s perspectives as the group’s own tensions around work and motherhood surface.
Soon we see how their concerns have shaped the historical men of Act I — the same men whose own prejudices and compromises shaped a text that profoundly influenced the English language, the stories Western culture tells about itself, and even the Christian narratives that underpin daily life in the patriarchal world that persists today.
On paper, it’s a satisfying setup. The women show us how every narrative beat from the first act came to be and the play’s biggest success is suggesting that just as the past may haunt the present, the present can haunt the past right back. The inside jokes about scrappy company life, too, landed particularly well with the Stratford’s opening night audience and they’re striking to hear in a well-funded institution. But for me, after about seven of these jokes, they wane and feel insular.
Despite the fine performances and all there is to unpack, I found it hard to locate the dramatic pull animating the play’s profound statements about the difficulty to create art (and the world) as a woman today. As Han keeps pushing Martie toward new interpretations — challenging why she’s driven to write about men — their arguments feel like a playwright debating herself in real time. This constant questioning in Act II kept me at a distance from the characters, leaving me with more of a concept than something embodied.
Still, it’s smart, funny, and ambitious. And it’s different: we watch historical men portray a modern-day, female perspective, adopting their gestures and comic sensibility in a framing only understood in retrospect. That’s an undeniably clever, feminist conceit. Like the opening scene’s pineapple, The King James Bible Play is an intricately constructed thing to admire — but its blunt philosophical exterior makes it hard to cut into the juicy fruit of lived experience that would make it transcendent.
The King James Bible Play runs at Stratford’s Studio Theatre until September 26. More information is available here.
Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Lindsey King
Lindsey King is a Toronto-based freelance writer and editor with bylines in Toronto Life, Maclean’s, Canadian Business, Intermission, and The Creative Independent.
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