Sermon Archive
Curlew River
Sermon preached by Kenneth Boyd at Evensong on 28 August 2005
Judges 16:28-30 ; 1 Peter 3:13-18
One of the highlights of this year's Festival was the production, at the Lyceum Theatre, of Benjamin Britten's Curlew River. Curlew River tells the story of a woman insane with grief over the loss of her 12 year-old-son, who was abducted from their home in the Western mountains by a slave trader. A year after the boy's disappearance, the madwoman is still searching for him, and arrives at a river in the fens the Curlew river where travellers are waiting to cross the ferry from west to east. The ferryman eventually agrees to take her also on board, and as they cross the river, he points out to his passengers a group of local people on the far bank who are praying at a grave, where, they believe, in the words of the libretto, 'some special grace is there/ to heal the sick in body and soul'. The grave, the ferryman explains, is that of a boy who, abused and then abandoned by a slave trader, fell ill and died there, exactly a year ago. When the ferry reaches the far bank it becomes clear to the madwoman that the boy was her son, and as she and the other travellers join in the prayers at his grave, the boy's spirit appears, joins in the chanting of the prayers, and speaks to his mother. Although the spirit then disappears again, it is clear by the end, that the mother has now been freed from her madness and to go her way in peace.
That bald account, I'm afraid, cannot hope to convey the powerful impression made by this Festival's fine production of Curlew River: everyone I've spoken to who also saw and heard it agreed that it was a highly moving experience. But what kind of experience was it? Let me try to explore that question a little by saying something, first about the origins of Curlew River and then about the different ways in which it has been produced.
The idea of Curlew River originally came to Benjamin Britten on a visit to Japan in 1956 where he saw two performances of the same play, Sumidagawa, or The Madwoman at the Sumida River. This play, which also was performed at this year's Festival, tells basically the same story I've just related, but in the Japanese Noh theatre ritualized style, with traditional staging, costume, vocal and instrumental music, dance and gesture. Recalling the origins of Curlew River, Britten wrote: The memory of this play has seldom left my mind in the years since. Was there not something many things to be learnt from it? The solemn dedication and skill of the performers were a lesson to any singer or actor of any country and any language. Was it not possible to use just such a story the simple one of a demented mother seeking her lost child with an English background? Surely the mediaeval religious drama in England would have had a comparable setting an all-male cast of ecclesiastics a simple austere staging in a church a very limited instrumental accompaniment a moral story. And so we came from Sumidagawa to Curlew River and a Church in the fens, but with the same story and similar characters'.
As originally conceived by Britten then, and originally conducted by him in a Suffolk parish church near his home in Aldeburgh, Curlew River was described as 'a parable for church performance'. In this context, the story of the madwoman is in fact a play within a play. It begins with an abbot and monks walking in procession to the acting area, chanting the evening hymn Te lucis ante terminum (To Thee before the end of day/ Creator of the world we pray ). The abbot then tells the people, as he might tell those gathered to hear a mediaeval religious drama: 'Good souls, I would have you know/ the brothers have come today/ to show you a mystery: how in sad mischance/ a sign was given of God's grace.' The monks are then ceremonially prepared, by putting on masks, for their parts in the play within the play. At its end the monks resume their habits, and the abbot tells the people that they have seen 'a sign of God's grace'. 'In hope, in peace, ends our mystery', he sings, and he and the monks then move slowly away from the acting area, singing once again the evening hymn.
That then was how Curlew River was originally, and has subsequently been, performed in churches. And according the director of its first production, in 1965, that is how it always should be performed. 'The very nature of Curlew River', he wrote, 'eschews any kind of theatrical presentation or surroundings, both in its convention and its religious basis. The sophisticated ambience of a theatre would be foreign to the nature of such a work.' That has not prevented subsequent directors from trying however, and having seen and heard this latest Edinburgh Festival production, I really wonder if the original director was correct. The singers and actors in this 'theatrical' presentation certainly required and demonstrated the 'dedication and skill' which Britten desired, and indeed if you already knew the libretto and had simply listened to the Festival production with your eyes closed, it would have been difficult to tell any real difference from the recording of the original performance apart perhaps from the distinctive voice, in the original recording, of Peter Pears. But there is also a deeper issue involved here, related to my question about what kind of experience it is to see and hear Curlew River. Truth is truth, wherever it found, whether in a church or in a theatre. This deeper issue was raised for me when quite by chance I was met an opera singer from a Festival Fringe production who was staying with some friends of ours. It transpired that he had also sung in another recent theatrical production of Curlew River. In the Festival production, the singers playing the monks do not appear at the beginning and end in ecclesiastical habits, although the indeterminate loose black greatcoats they wear could perhaps be taken as such; and the singer who acts the madwoman is clothed in a long black ball-gown. How, I asked the singer who was staying with our friends, had his production managed this? Well, he told me, in that production the singers playing the monks had been dressed as policemen. 'As policemen?' I asked. 'Yes,' he said, 'the idea in our production was that the policemen put on the play within the play as a way of investigating the unsolved crime of the boy's abduction the idea was that they were doing it for their own purposes, of solving a crime, just as the monks, in other productions, were putting on the play for their own purposes.'
Well, as it happened, my conversation with the singer was interrupted at that point, and I've been left wondering about it ever since. Perhaps the music and libretto of Curlew River are powerful enough to overcome any visually discordant production, but wasn't presenting the monks as policemen reducing its deep message to the banal commonplace - of a criminal investigation? Perhaps. But then again there was another thought. The experience of the madwoman in Curlew River is one of which we read all too often in our daily newspapers the loss of a child, in some cases abducted and killed or left to die. It happens far more often in other countries, but also even here and who but the police are turned to by bereaved families today in their desperate anxiety to know what has happened to their children?
In our time then, it is understandable that the law has such prominence in any story about the death of a lost child, and so perhaps that Curlew River might be interpreted in this way. But the law has its limits, and although many people bereaved in this way nowadays tell the media that they will not be able to get on with their lives until the perpetrators have been brought to justice, at the heart of Curlew River as of the original Japanese play, Sumidagawa, there is something of even greater import, not the 'closure' of legal satisfaction, but the healing of the spirit.
In both plays, the healing of the mother's spirit is brought about through the appearance of the spirit of the child. This must be the most difficult aspect for any director, especially of Curlew River, to know how to present, and apparently even Britten himself had difficulty with the music for it. In the Edinburgh Festival production, the child appears naturalistically on centre stage and addresses his mother directly. Here perhaps suspension of disbelief is most difficult for many people today, for at least two reasons. The first and most obvious is that few of us know of anything even remotely like this in our own experience. The second reason is that the words sung by the child are so much those of conventional Christian consolation that many people now consider them simply too good to be true: 'Go your way in peace, mother./ The dead shall rise again/ and in that blessed day/ we shall meet again in heaven.'
For both of these reasons then, it may be that the answer to my question about what kind of experience is was to hear and see Curlew River must be this: it was an aesthetic experience, but not a spiritual one. Yet to say that, I think, is to overlook the kind of world we actually live in a world we were perhaps abruptly reminded of earlier in this service, if, listening closely to the story of Samson pulling down the house on his own and the Philistines' heads, we sensed that this hero of our own religious tradition was uncomfortably close to a suicide bomber. The real world, again, is the world in which such things, and the Curlew River madwoman's unassuageable grief, are also present. But it is also a world in which not just 'closure' and forgetfulness, but also healing may take place; and for many of those to whom it does take place, the conventional Christian words sung by the child at the end of Curlew River, however too good to be true they may seem to others, express the hope 'that keeps their dying faith alive'.
In the original Japanese play, the madwoman recovers her sanity and her spirit is healed, but there is no such hope of a future 'blessed day' as Britten introduced in his Christian version. The Japanese play ends in the kind of healing and tragic wisdom which is the most anyone can hope to be certain of here on earth. Curlew River, by contrast, opens up a possibility the possibility that the interior experience of healing, an experience of which, in all its fragility, our external senses can give us no proof or certainty the possibility that this interior experience is also of cosmic significance that it is ultimately caused by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars. Or, as the abbot sings at the end of what truly is the spiritual experience of Curlew River: 'In hope, in peace, ends our mystery.'
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