Pentecost by David Edgar

First published: 1995

First produced: 1994, at The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, England

Type of plot: Political

Time of work: 1989 to the early 1990’s

Locale: An unnamed southeast European country, presumably Bosnia Herzegovina

Principal Characters:

• Gabriella Pecs, an art curator in her thirties
• Dr. Oliver Davenport, an English art historian in his forties
• Mikhail Czaba, a minister for monuments in his twenties
• Leo Katz, an American art historian in his thirties
• Anna Jedlikova, a former dissident and present magistrate in her fifties
• Yasmin, a stateless Palestinian and leader of asylum-seekers in her thirties

The Play

In an abandoned Romanesque church in an unnamed Balkan country (presumably Bosnia Herzegovina) Gabriella Pecs shows Dr. Oliver Davenport a lamentation fresco said to date from the early thirteenth century. She tells him how she has tracked it down by following the story of its provenance as it is set out in the (fictional) “Old Nagolitic” national epic (c. 1215). A foreign traveler headed for Persia is captured by villagers and threatened with death but saves his skin by offering to paint on their church wall the famous scene of the Virgin and Christ’s followers mourning the dead Jesus. The fresco uncannily recalls Florentine painter and architect Giotto di Bondone’s Lamentation (1304-1306) in Padua, Italy, both in its verisimilitude and in its skillful deployment of perspective, although it was created a century before the Italian masterpiece. If authentic, it would rank as the art discovery of the century, since only 1 percent of Byzantine era paintings are known to have survived. Even more, it would mark the beginning of the Renaissance and the great shift in the West from a theocratic to a humanistic perspective.

Contemporary representatives of church and state—an Orthodox priest, a Roman Catholic priest, a hardline right-wing nationalist leader with skinhead support, and a swinging American-slang-talking minister for the preservation of national monuments—contend among themselves and with Davenport and Pecs regarding the disposition of the fresco, which was hidden by bricks for centuries and which was, until the play’s opening, covered by a “grand heroic revolutionary picture,” a piece of agitprop kitsch. To this sextet joins a brash, fast-talking, erudite American art historian, Leo Katz, who not only doubts the account of the provenance of the fresco but also, and more important, opposes removing it from the wall by an elaborate procedure of chemical transfers. Katz has been brought in by the Orthodox priest as an expert witness to forestall the removal. Anna Jedlikova, a fifty-year-old former student dissident and political prisoner under the former communist government that recently ended after a forty-year tenure, then enters. She has become a magistrate and has been brought in to adjudicate the dispute.

The stage is nearly set. However, at the end of act 1 a motley group of eleven armed refugees plus an infant—a Palestinian Kuwaiti, an Azeri (Azerbaijani), a Mozambican, a Bosnian, a Russian, a Ukrainian, an Afghan, a Sri Lankan, two Bosnian Roma, and a Kurd—together with two British hostages, burst in seeking sanctuary. Each speaks his or her language for the duration of the play (translated in the text), whereas before the audience heard the language of the country (presumably Serbo-Croatian, actually Bulgarian) now and then along with various kinds of English. The intruders take the others hostage (a few manage to escape), force them to exchange clothes with the refugees, and lock the church. The act ends with a police loudspeaker outside telling the refugees they are surrounded and must surrender.

Act 1 covers about one month. In the accelerated act 2, covering about eighteen hours, the asylum-seekers demand safe passage and work permits to Western Europe, threatening the hostages’ lives if their demands are not met. Phone messages pass back and forth, skinheads plan an assault, and the police surround the church. The Roman Catholic priest, who left earlier, enters naked to show he is not wired and says that some can go but not all. Anger and confusion and a babel of tongues follow.

Yasmin, the Palestinian leader, threatens to kill Katz to demonstrate her seriousness, but Davenport intervenes. He overheard the word for “rock” (uttered by the skinheads), connects it with the Italian for “hunchback” (the words are near homonyms), and, since there is a hump-shouldered person in Giotto’s fresco, imagines someone describing the Padua Lamentation to the fresco painter. This leads him to oppose the priest’s contention that the provenance of the fresco has not been proven and, subsequently, it has little value. He now conjectures, amid rising tension, that the painter was not an Italian traveling east but an Arab colorist coming west, who had seen the mosaics of Constantinople and frescos in Serbia or Macedonia. The artist hears the strange story of the woman whose son dies on a tree but comes back after three days. Fascinated, he paints the scene using a deep ultramarine blue (powdered lapis lazuli) unknown in the West. Unmoved, Yasmin orders the fresco doused with gasoline and, in a desperate last act, threatens to burn it if they are not freed. Then a stunning coup de théâtre occurs: An explosion and sirens are heard, smoke rises, and masked German-speaking commandos burst through a hole in the fresco wall and start shooting. After this chaos, four refugees, including Yasmin and Davenport (he is dressed as a refugee), lie dead.

In the last scene the audience learns that the authorities outside the church have heard all along what has been going on inside from a bug they slipped in with Davenport’s insulin medication and never had any intention of granting safe passage. The play ends with cryptic one-word exchanges between Pecs and Katz.

Dramatic Devices

Pentecost is a play and could only be a play. It displays at every turn a hugely experienced and dyed-in-the-wool dramatist (it is Edgar’s thirty-second full-length play). The dramatic devices provide an intense theater experience: the virtuoso use of languages, the set dominated by the bricked-up fresco, which is increasingly revealed as the play proceeds, the noises offstage (for example, the roar of diesel engines, the amplified police voices, the explosions, the solo cello at the end of the sixth scene in act 2), the candles and cooking fires in the darkened church in act 2, and the stunning and violent climax with the German-speaking commandos bursting through the wall and shooting five dead. Indeed, Pentecost exploits the possibilities of the medium in such a way as to put to an extreme test the talents of the director, the production designer, the sound and light technicians, and the actors, who are required to learn lines in Bulgarian, Russian, Arabic, Sinhalese, and Turkic, among other languages.

Critical Context

David Edgar has said he would like to be remembered, like Honoré de Balzac, as the secretary of his times. In the case of both Balzac and David Edgar, “recording angel” might be more accurate, since each takes on the burden of attempting to present a grand synoptic view of his era. In Edgar’s case, however, the view is largely circumscribed by politics, since he clearly subscribes to Thomas Mann’s dictum about the destiny of humankind asserting itself in political terms. Still, his attempt to take the grand synoptic view means that his works must be read collectively; they complement and reinforce one another, much like those of Balzac. Like his great predecessor he finds it impossible to get said what he feels must be said in one work, or perhaps even in one life.

Edgar has written scores of one-act and full-length plays, including the major political dramas Destiny (pr. 1972), Maydays (pr., pb. 1983), and The Shape of the Table (pr., pb. 1990), as well as the hugely successful The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (pr. 1980, pb. 1982). He has written extensively for radio and television and has done film work. He is the author of a number of essays and reviews exploring the relationship of politics and theater and is a major force at Manchester University in fostering young playwrights. A man on the move and an inveterate sponsor and attendee at international conferences, he is a sophisticated and widely read student of political theory and a political activist with Marxist leanings.

Several works have followed Pentecost, but critics agree that Pentecost is his crowning achievement. It develops the themes of his other plays—the adversarial relationship between self and state, the place of the arts in an increasingly politicized age, the changing definitions of revolution and the conflict of the hard and soft Left, the power and impotence of the individual vis-à-vis history, the void left by the collapse of the Soviet empire—and refocuses them in an unprecedented and brilliantly original fashion. Pentecost is indeed a parable for the modern era and presents its themes with rare dramatic boldness, sweep, and power. It ranks among the most ambitious, the most complex, the most profound, and the most successful political plays of twentieth century drama. It also proves an invaluable study for understanding some of the consequences of the fall of Soviet communism.

Sources for Further Study

Edgar, David. The Second Time as Farce: Reflections on the Drama of Mean Times. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1998.

Edgar, David. “Ten Years of Political Theatre, 1968-1978.” Theatre Quarterly, Winter, 1979.

Grant, Steve. “Writer’s Bloc.” Time Out, May 31-June 7, 1995.

Hanks, Robert. “Speaking in Tongues.” Independent, October 26, 1994.

Lavender, Andy. “New Pastures Green.” New Statesman, October 21, 1994.

Page, Malcolm. File on Edgar. London: Methuen, 1991.

Painter, Susan. Edgar the Dramatist. London: Methuen, 1996.

Swain, Elizabeth. David Edgar: Playwright and Politician. New York: P. Lang, 1986.