Light Shining in Buckinghamshire

For ten years in the middle of the seventeenth century, England was governed by radical extremists. Fuelled by unshakeable religious conviction, soldiers killed the king believing that Christ would come to replace him. Theirs was a war to establish heaven on earth. To those who believed in the established order, it must have seemed that the future was in the hands of the terrorists. Written in 1976, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire speaks directly to our own political moment. A dramatic collage of the most turbulent period of English history, it tells the story of a group of men and women who thought they had glimpsed a spark of unspeakable, transcendent glory. It is impossible not to hear echoes of our own times. Caryl Churchill’s remarkable play is set during England’s Civil War, around the 1647 Putney Debates when an egalitarian state briefly seemed within the grasp of the New Model Army and its radical agitators. Churchill takes a scalpel to the English body politic exposing how, 350 years on, we’ve failed to address fundamental questions of individual freedom. The two acts each culminate in a crucial debate. The first uses edited transcripts of the 1647 Putney Debates, where Cromwell and General Ireton face down the Levellers, preferring land rights to equal rights for all. Off stage, Leveller leaders are executed at Ware, and the dream is snuffed out. The second debate is very different. This time there are no gentry present, just a group of starving Ranters debating Christ’s imminent, glorious return and their release from bondage. In the ashes of revolution Churchill finds a cinder still burning, a new spiritual freedom that comes from within. Around these set pieces a swirl of characters, in short elliptical scenes depict the state of the nation, and the hierarchy of entitlement that keeps everyone in their place. We see brutal poverty, starvation, abandoned children and men desperate for change. We see women excluded from the New Jerusalem and new bosses the same as the old bosses. Doors open half an hour before curtain up with Tea/Coffee and Bar. EFTPOS Facilities are availible.