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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 181 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 181, December 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Pentecost
by David Edgar
David Edgar attempts to deal with one of the big issues of our time: the rise of nationalism and how it divides us. In response to this nationalism he searches for a common cultural identity.
The play is set in the bitter mess of war torn Eastern Europe, where the end of Stalinism and onset of capitalist crisis have often led to deep national chauvinism. We see people who have been forced to speak an alien language and have had their culture stunted. We are on the border of a divided nation, in a ruined church that has been used over its history as a place of worship for Catholics and the Orthodox church, as a stable, a Nazi torture chamber and a Stalinist art gallery.
A curator from the national museum has discovered a bricked up fresco on the wall which she believes pre-dates Giotto, and therefore the previously established beginnings of Renaissance painting, which began to demonstrate a rational view of the world. If she is right this would rewrite the history of Western art.
The fresco becomes a metaphor in the search for (and ownership of) truth and reason through the layers of historical distortion. A British art historian, sponsored by a German engineering firm, is persuaded to help uncover the painting. The plan is to remove it from the plaster wall, ‘clean it up’ and exhibit it in the national gallery.
A rival Jewish American art historian intervenes against ‘restoration’ and conservation, wanting to keep the painting as it is with all the effects of history to remind us of our past.
The painting becomes the subject of fierce argument between the local ultra-nationalist, the churches and the minister of tourism, who plays the nationalist card to move the painting to the museum, which will give his government a linked foreign investment.
Into the debate burst a group of armed refugees. Edgar portrays this as representative of the world’s oppressed. The academics are taken hostage in exchange for the refugees’ passage to safe countries. Outside the church a crowd of Nazi skinheads gather, threatening to burn it down, but are pre-empted by the national guard who storm the building, smash the painting and murder the British art historian.
The strongest aspect of the play is Edgar’s warning of the need to act against fascism. He presents the choice between fascism and a sort of unity of the oppressed. To make his point Edgar takes us through an argument which has the oppressed uniting around a common mythical language.
Despite some witty dialogue surrounding the irony of the Statue of Liberty welcoming the ‘huddled masses’ while at the same time the US slaughters masses of people around the world, Edgar gets caught up in the idea that all individuals are responsible for oppression. So all Americans share some responsibility for slavery and all Europeans some blame for the Holocaust.
Absent is any sense of class forces shaping the world. But it is this which will decide the fate of fascism.
The structure of the play hangs on the art history detective story, and through this the academic is challenged in his assumptions about the development of Western culture. It is a very stimulating three hours of polemical debate, with many ideas packed in. But ultimately it seems like a large jigsaw puzzle that does not quite fit.
Pentecost is in repertory at The Other Place, Stratford upon Avon, and then touring
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