The purpose behind the performance of the philosophical drama Agnes of God was “to explore how theatre can serve as a vehicle for discussion and dialogue on the human quest for existential meaning” and to illuminate the seemingly stark divide between believers and non-believers. It is safe to say the play delivered on this intention, not least because of the charged nature of this topic in contemporary Malta.
The play cut close to the bone and proved rather absorbing. But while aptly calling into question the presuppositions that audiences brought to the theatre, it may have also reinforced a seemingly irreconcilable rift between faith and reason, spirituality and science.
Agnes of God was produced by Tyrone Grima and Christian Colombo and ran at the Valletta Campus Theatre between December 3 and 7. Written by John Pielmeier in 1979, it is a drama about a young nun, Agnes, played by Kyra Lautier, accused of manslaughter after a newborn was found strangled by its own umbilical cord in a wastebasket in her room. She seemingly has no recollection of the birth or the conception.
The play is set in the office of Dr Martha Livingstone, played by Simone Ellul, a court-appointed psychiatrist whose task is to determine Agnes’s sanity. Agnes’s mother superior, Mother Miriam Ruth, played by Isabel Warrington, is her most vehement defender despite the improbability of her claims.
The set was composed of two to three chairs and a desk at the far corner of the stage, with only Latin chants, cigarette smoke and Pielmeier’s script to fill the space in between. The simplicity of the set necessitated a masterful performance to keep the play afloat and the audience engaged, and the play’s first-rate cast did just that. This holy trinity of actors elevated what could have been a torrent of verbose lines into a series of moments teeming with humanity and significance, resulting in a performance at once gripping and engrossing.
The interpretation of the role of Agnes was particularly important to get right, and was more so the responsibility of the director, Tyron Grima. In the character of Agnes we encounter faith without logic, escaping her in excess and without any worldly grounding. Her physical and intellectual seclusion and the abuse she suffered as a child turned her into what Mother Miriam calls “an innocent”, who in turn uses this to bolster her belief that Agnes is likewise incapable of the crime she is accused of.
Dr Livingstone prods into Agnes to discern whether her angelic disposition is all a ruse or the result of her childhood misfortune. While dealing with her own ill feelings towards the Church and all it stands for, she is sceptical of all that is not the fruit of reason and spurred by logic.
Reason in the form of Dr Livingston and faith in the dual forms of Mother Miriam and Agnes are pitted against each other in the main motif of the play. They are presented as disjointed and in conflict, almost irreconcilably so, although there are moments of communion during some of the conversations between Dr Livingston and Mother Miriam.
How can we reconcile our sense of disquiet in the face of Agnes’s faith with our desire to have faith that is compatible with reason?
It is difficult to contend with the character of Agnes, who may at times make us feel uncomfortable as she lapses into spiritual frenzy, consumed by visions of the Virgin dripping blood and other such ideations. At times, in fact, it is hard to look her in the eye. Nevertheless – and this is testament to Grima’s insightful direction and Lautier’s competence as an actor – she was not presented as irredeemably bizarre or “totally bananas”, thus giving the audience the opportunity to be receptive towards her.
Mother Miriam’s faith is perhaps more palatable than that of Agnes. We are surprised to learn that she has children and grandchildren and that she joined the convent later in life. She yearns for simplicity in faith, perhaps the kind she sees in Agnes, but her own frame of reference disallows this. “What we gained in logic we have lost in faith,” she laments.
Her character demonstrates a complexity that we do not often attribute to Church figures, whom we tend to envisage as extensions of their institution and who do not contain the multitudes that regular human beings possess.
Like perhaps some in the audience, Dr Livingston carries presuppositions about nuns and the Catholic Church based on hurt, anger and disgust (to which fellow convent school survivors may be sympathetic). One of the messages put forward in the play was that we should afford these figures the same openness we may afford others of a more secular slant, but this may prove difficult when faced with Church figures of Agnes’s disposition.
How can we reconcile our sense of disquiet in the face of Agnes’s faith – one with claims of miracles, divine hallucinations and virgin births – with our desire to have faith in such a way that is compatible with reason? Perhaps the one great fault of the play is that it pits ‘unreasonable’ faith, with its almost supernatural claims, against logic and science, which can easily rubbish such claims of faith. It gives the impression that faith is something pre-rational, or disjoined from rationality, as opposed to a surrender beyond reason.
Had the play pitted less supernatural and fantastical claims of faith against reason, then it may have been more successful at bridging the divide between atheists and theists because then it may have shown that the tyranny of science is not the yardstick by which everything should be measured.
This lack of an adequate resolution proves unsatisfying and leaves audiences as they exit the theatre wondering how they can move forward from here. Can we reconcile the divide between reason and faith? The play seems to tell us that we cannot.
Simone Weil once wrote that “of two men who have no experience of God, he who denies him is perhaps nearer to him than the other”. Agnes of God has been a good reminder of the ever-present role of faith in the lives of believers and non-believers alike, and it is fortunate that a production of the sort, performed with such competence, has been brought to the local stage in these godless times.