Murder in the Cathedral: David Suchet is spellbinding

OK, T.S. Eliot’s 1935 verse drama about the killing of Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket in 1170 is always going to be a niche sell, even with the velvety gravitas and star power of David Suchet in the lead. Yet there is something audacious and magnificent in Tom Littler and Francesca Ellis’s staging for the Orange Tree in its neighbouring church.

How wonderful that in London right now you can see Rent, Six, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, new James Graham and Caryl Churchill plays and this: a poetic debate about faith and the overreach of power, complete with a singing Greek chorus of women.

Murder in the Cathedral features a Christmas sermon, a biblical scene of temptation, and wordy, direct-address speeches of self-justification at the end by the four knights who slaughtered Becket, following the plausibly deniable incitement of Henry II.

Contemporary echoes of the time of gathering fascism when Eliot was writing are unignorable. The knights act like the far-right thugs who threatened the vicar of Doncaster Minster in August, under a veil of religiosity and patriotism. They sound like urbane populists suckling their base.

Apart from Cats, which doesn’t really count, Eliot’s plays aren’t done much these days, and for good reason. He sought to revive poetic drama, in theatres and churches, with a loose, conversational verse style that sounds contrived and effortful today. The plays are dense, verbose and the religious ones see him wrangling in public with his Anglo-Catholic faith.

The Women of Canterbury

Marc Brenner

These flaws are converted to virtues here. The ritualised language, declamatory speech and moral questioning sit well in this Victorian church, a lofty box with stark, carved reliefs of the Stations of the Cross, contrasting with an opulent altar. The profanity of a killing in a place of faith is powerfully felt.

It helps immeasurably that Suchet is a venerable Shakespearean and a man of faith who has recorded and studied the bible, as well as Hercule Poirot to generations of TV fans. He speaks the language beautifully and he’s a spellbinding presence: Complacently fluent and beakily authoritative until beset by doubt or galvanised by a sudden squirt of fear.

The scabbed and scruffy chorus are barefoot in beige shifts: when Becket preached I half-hoped he’d pray for their “leetle grey souls”. Against the black garb of three priests and the four knights, the purple lining of his vestments flashes like vanity.

It’s a neat expression of the central question here: has Becket, who rose from poverty in Cheapside and was formerly Henry’s compliant chancellor, set himself against the king out of genuine religious devotion or out of pride? Is his acceptance of martyrdom saintly or self-serving?

Designer Robert Jones has laid a crucifix-catwalk down the central nave, flanked by banks of lighting that paint the ceiling in blue, celestial white or a sudden, alarming wash of red. Incense drifts and a single drum thuds as the chorus of “ordinary women” gather, singing in lilting, keening harmony of Becket’s return after seven years’ exile in France. In a neat bit of synergy, a core of four professional actor-singers is surrounded by an ensemble of “ordinary” locals marshalled by Francesca Ellis, the Orange Tree’s community director.

The sung passages are among the most atmospheric and moving moments here, alongside Becket’s speeches. “Wash the air, clean the sky,” the women keen after the murder, as if the whole world is bloodstained. “Humankind cannot take very much reality,” Suchet’s Becket sagely observes – a line that later resurfaced in Burnt Norton in Eliot’s famous Four Quartets sequence of poems.

Among the supporting cast Jyuddah Jaymes is swaggering and laddish as the first Knight, Reginald Fitz Urse and David Yelland suave and lawyerly as the fourth, Richard Brito. I can pretty much guarantee that you won’t see anything as strange, challenging and fascinating on a London stage this year. And as you leave this church, drunk on incense and ideas, cast your eyes back at what the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner called its “senseless flying buttresses”.