Snippet
Culture
Film & TV
Politics
Royalty
2 min read

Would you rather live in Wolf Hall?

Monarchy and deciding who's really in charge.
A TV production set shows Henry VIII at a masked ball.
Daniel Day-Lewis digs his claws into the role of Henry VIII.
BBC.

Viewers of Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light may well have breathed a sigh of relief: thank goodness we don’t live in such times. Henry VIII, depicted by Damian Lewis with lionesque intensity, flexes and pouts at his Privy Council, prepared to send even his own daughter to the axeman’s block. He is unimaginably powerful, capricious, and easily offended.  

Meanwhile, almost four-thousand miles away, we have just witnessed a democratic election in a nation which wanted nothing to do with kings. Donald Trump has won a second term in the White House - whatever one thinks of him, a sitting President is contained by counterpoised checks and balances. Congress. The Supreme Court. Here, at least, are some features that would have usefully reigned in Henry VIII’s absolute power. 

Kings are perhaps cutting a rather pathetic figure right now, even without a sulky, fur-clad Damian Lewis to damage their PR. A few weeks ago, King Charles was heckled by an Australian Senator during a trip to Parliament: “not my King!” yelled Lidia Thorpe. Lately, King Felipe VI of Spain had dirt hurled at him as he walked through Paiporta, to examine the damages of recent floods. So much for a royal welcome.  

So, is this just the way things are going? Farewell to tyrants. Humiliated, shouted at, mud-splattered and powerless - will we finally decommission them like old submarines? 

But the question of “who’s really in charge here?” is one that all human societies have to face squarely. For our ancestors, there had to be something real behind a legitimate government. It could not just be a useful or appropriate way of organising ourselves - there had to be something copper-bottomed to give authority its clout. Only the gods could prop up a leader. In the pagan world, a philosopher like Aristotle would add that it is just the case that some people rule, some are ruled. 

The UK constitution - though few would speak of it in this way - is premised on the idea that the King represents the people of this country to God, who alone can vouchsafe his legitimacy. A monarch in this sense is not absolute. They are contained - contained by the most comprehensive and eternal power that can be conceived. No tyrant gets away with it, on the Christian view. 

All societies seek this real basis to power, whether that is “self-evident truths”, or the “will of the people”. The question is: which of them provide for a flourishing community for the longest? King Felipe may have been abused, but he did not flee to the refuge of a car like the Prime Minister. Here was a man of immense privilege reaching out to his subjects. Despite their pain and anger, he wanted to show he really cared - indeed, that he was born to care. For as long as monarchies seem like a reasonable and compassionate answer to the issue of legitimate government, they may endure yet. 

Article
Culture
Easter
Romance
Theatre
6 min read

Hadestown hints at so much more

The subterranean stage hit resonates deeply.

Freya is a curate at St Mary's Church, Islington.

A theatrical staging shows a couple seperated by a man standing between them.
Eurydice and Orpheus separated.
Hadestown.com

Hadestown – a folk jazz opera interpretation of the tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice – is currently flourishing in London’s West End. Like the myth upon which it is based, Anaïs Mitchell’s opus has had many iterations. I had been listening to these songs for a decade by the time I saw the stage show. As a Christian priest, I am used to relating all myths, narratives, and fables to the story of Christianity. And yet, it was not until I saw Hadestown performed that the resonance with the Christian “myth” hit me all at once.  

In the myth (and the musical), a hero goes down to the underworld to retrieve his beloved from Hades, god of the dead. On Holy Saturday (the day between Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday), the church celebrates Christ’s descent to the dead and his freeing of imprisoned souls. This tradition is commonly known as the Harrowing of Hell. Art imagining this victory often depicts Jesus standing atop hell’s gates, ripped off their hinges, as he plunders the realm of a bound figure. Icons have Christ encircled in ripples of light as if he’s burst through the very walls of time and space to snatch his people from Death’s clutches. In some portrayals, he is pulling Adam and Eve – the original symbols of the rift in the God-humanity relationship – from their graves. The Harrowing of Hell receives more emphasis in Catholic and Orthodox traditions, but all Christians share some concept of Christ as rescuer, saviour, liberator.  

In the mythical world of Hadestown, something is broken. The seasons have collapsed, resources are scarce. Trouble in the underworld is causing everything to be off kilter in the overworld (not an uncommon concept in ancient thought). A contemporary audience can certainly relate to references to rising seas and widespread famine, as well as to the futility and despair permeating everyone’s inner monologue. The question the show poses is: can anyone break this cycle? Is there someone who could restore a broken relationship, rescue a soul back from the underworld…even make Spring come again?  

Humanity’s potential champion is Orpheus, a young man blessed with a supernatural gift for poetry and music. He is composing a melody “to fix what’s wrong”. When the song is finally sung, “Spring will come again” – the world will come “back into tune”, and “all the flowers will bloom”.  

The foil to Orpheus’s optimism is Eurydice, his lover. In this version, she is not killed but leaves for the underground realm of Hadestown, seeking food and shelter. I was moved afresh by her lament (‘Flowers’), sung in the depths of Hadestown’s mines, as Eurydice, like the prodigal son from St Luke’s story, realises what a mistake she has made. Hadestown’s inhabitants, it transpires, are not just trapped by the city walls – they are spiritually captive, indentured to Hades and his vision: eternal industry; perpetual war. Eurydice can no longer remember her beloved’s name, but she can remember that he could make flowers bloom in winter. She sings a petition for him to come and find her “lying in the bed [she] made.” 

We the audience know all along that Orpheus is coming, thanks to the song in the preceding act (‘Wait For Me’). Upon learning where Eurydice is, he undertakes the perilous descent to the underworld, all the while repeating “wait for me, I’m coming”. In a breathtaking moment of set design, the walls of Hadestown move aside in response to the beauty of Orpheus’s song. Eurydice’s prayer is answered by his sudden appearance, and his poignant invitation: “come home with me”.  

After the bows, the cast toast to the Orpheuses of the world, who show us things as they could be.

Orpheus is soon confronted, however, with the ugly reality of Hadestown. Eurydice has already signed her life away. Beaten and defeated, his innocent worldview shattered, Orpheus sings over and over “is it true?”. He is asking something more fundamental than if what is happening around him is real. He is demanding if this, the world that is, is the world that should be. Should we let the truth belong to those who “load the dice”, he asks?  

Hadestown’s walls take pity on Orpheus as they did before, echoing his song through the mines, where the workers – millions of other Eurydices – take up his song. The Dead-to-the-world realise they have been deceived, and remember who they were. And their faith starts to grow – that if Orpheus can walk out of Hades, then they can too. They want freedom.  

Persephone, Hades’ estranged queen, is won over by Orpheus. But Hades understands the truth about love: one flower starts a Spring. The fall of a kingdom begins with a crack in the wall. Unwilling to kill Orpheus because of Persephone, Hades instead sets up the famous tragic terms: if Orpheus can walk all the way to the surface without looking back to check Eurydice is behind him, freedom is theirs. It is a test Orpheus is doomed to fail, thanks to his experience in Hadestown. The mentality of the underworld has come to live in Orpheus’s head, and so “the path to paradise” becomes “the road to ruin”, and the story meets its inevitable end.  

And yet Orpheus does not fail as completely as he thinks. His musical gift has reconciled Persephone and Hades, and this has brought Spring to the world again. After the bows, the cast toast to the Orpheuses of the world, who show us things as they could be, and leave us with the responsibility to keep singing despite the circumstances, to reject despair, to hold on to that vision of every captive soul walking out of Hell. 

Myths tell us what we collectively fear and desire. Contemporary retellings show us how these longings have changed – or not. In what C.S. Lewis called the “true myth” of Christ, we see the fulfilment of Hadestown’s hopeful vision.  An early modern hymn describes Christ like Hadestown’s Orpheus – his presence “sees December turn’d to May”, making all the ground of the expectant “under-earth” turn to flowers. He is the one who has walked “the road that no one ever walked before”. The one who didn’t need to persuade the gods to empathise with him, because he was God. The one who was the perfect advocate for humankind, because he was human. Divinity without caprice, love without finitude: the one who experienced fear, temptation, ridicule – and yet did not turn back from the task. A peasant living under occupation: “this poor boy brought the world back into tune”.  

I was fortunate enough to see Melanie La Barrie in one of her final performances as Hadestown’s Hermes. Her voice gives the divine storyteller a godparental authority: La Barrie’s Hermes doesn’t so much narrate the story as prophesies it. At the inescapable end of the play, Hermes stands looking down like a graveside mourner, searching for the words to reignite the company. Hermes seems to have a divine vocation to keep telling the tale “regardless of how it ends” until it changes. This act is presented to us as faith, hope, resistance. In this new reality, where Spring has returned and the cosmic order has shifted, the tale might turn out differently upon the next telling, and so Hermes strikes up the band once more.  

Every year we sing the sad song again. The betrayal, the trial, the burial: the body in the tomb; the disciples in hiding. For so many, the-world-as-it-is feels like an endless Holy Saturday. The tradition of the Harrowing of Hell whispers to us to hold steady, because the rescuer is coming. “The darkest hour of the darkest night comes right before the dawn”, and a crack is appearing in the wall. 

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