by Matthew Hurt
Performed by Linda Marlowe
Directed by Gavin Marshall
The World Premiere of Linda Marlowe's new solo show
[ new british plays season 2006 ]
Sundays and Mondays, 10, 11, 17, 18, 24 and 25 September 2006
This production subsequently went on National Tour including a run at the Traverse Theatre during the 2007 Edinburgh Festival where Linda Marlowe was nominated for The Stage Award for Acting Excellence.
Murder. Abduction. Rape. Incest. Disguise. Seduction. To a modern sensibility the tales of the Old Testament are wild and implausible. But re-told in a psychologically truthful light, one question is raised: where exactly does God fit in? Believe looks at the women who, seemingly forgotten by God and mankind, carved their names into history.
Linda Marlowe’s West End acting credits include Decadence, The Trial, Metamorphosis, Hamlet, Greek, Coriolanus directed by Steven Berkoff; and Too Clever By Half and A Flea in Her Ear, directed by Richard Jones at the Old Vic; The Virtuoso and The Theban Triology for the Royal Shakespeare Company; as well as One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (Manchester Royal Exchange), A Streetcar Named Desire (Sherman Theatre, Cardiff), Callas, directed by Paul Kerryson (Oldham Coliseum), Suddenly Last Summer, directed by Ralph Koltai (Nottingham Playhouse). Television includes Floodtide, The Avengers, The Queens Arms, The Fear, The Ruth Rendell Mysteries, The Green Man (with Albert Finney), Lovejoy, Love Hurts, Class Act, Lynda La Plante’s series She’s Out, Silent Witness, Dalziel and Pascoe, Midsomer Murders, Chambers, Spooks and Family. Films include Big Zapper, Beckett, The Man Outside, Tamlyn, Manifesto, Mr Love, Wasp and most recently The House Of Mirth with Gillian Anderson. She also won the 1990 Manchester Evening News Award for Best Director.
Playwright Matthew Hurt’s previous work includes the prose piece Bear Mountain and Back, which was broadcast on BBC 1 and Singing! Dancing! Acting! which was produced at the Soho Theatre and has also been translated into French and performed in Paris. He wrote Mortal Ladies Possessed for Linda Marlowe in 2005, an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ short stories, which has toured nationally and has been performed in New York and at the Edinburgh Festival. His most recent play, The Time Step, is to be produced in 2007 and the musical, Have A Nice Life, for which he wrote the book, is premiering at the New York Musical Theatre Festival this September. Matthew has recently been awarded a bursary by the Peggy Ramsay Foundation.
The Press on Linda Marlowe
“Watch her and learn – if not how to act, then how to live” – New York Sun
“Marlowe is a consummate actress: gorgeous to look at, slinky and sexy, sensual and impassioned, breathtakingly versatile. A veritable tour de force.” – The Scotsman
“When she spreads her arms, she embraces the world. Her voice is an instrument of silk and seduction, frayed at the edges and pickled in port.” – The Daily Mail
“Marlowe is in the first division of British actresses” – The New Yorker
The Press on Believe at the Finborough Theatre
"Faith, and by that I do mean ‘of the religious sort’, does seem to be back on the debating roster again. We can thank the War on Terror for that, I think.
The peace of our New Secular Age has been shattered on numerous occasions by the acts of extremists on both sides of the religious and political divide in the past few years. Now that the terrorist threat is beginning to become an everyday fact of life again, an interest in understanding what drives the extremes of religious fervour is beginning to emerge.
Believe by Matthew Hurt, which is playing at Earls Court’s Finborough Theatre, is not a play about George W Bush or Al-Qaeda but they are lurking in the background and will no doubt pop into your mind at some point during its seventy-five minute duration. The glare of the turbulent times we are living in cause this deceptively simple play to cast a long and interesting shadow.
Believe is populated with five female characters from the Old Testament: Rahab, Bathsheba, Sarah, Judith and Maccabees. Matthew Hurt has craftily re-worked each of their stories and re-set them in a modern time frame along with a clarifying dose of psychological truth to sharpen the flavour.
Each of the women is a slightly side-lined Old Testament figure who finds herself embroiled in an extraordinary situation set to test her faith and beliefs to the limit. Rahab, our first encounter, is the whore who chooses to hide two of God’s chosen ones from their enemies in her home. Her gossipy tone and everyday attitude towards graphic sexual experiences are a wonderful ice-breaker for the evening. Belief is not the exclusive property of the morally up-right it seems.
Socially, Bathsheba is as lofty as Rahab is low. This general’s wife is a poise-perfect military spouse from the Classic British Army range, who wealds exactly the requisite amount of disdain for the Sergeant-Major’s wife. Unfortunately, her married life is in turmoil and she is rapidly becoming the talk of the Army base so the cracks are beginning to show. Here the outwardly moral prove to be chillingly Godless.
Next the ninety year old Sarah warmly extols the present wonder of being a mother for that miracle first time. She is hotly followed by Judith, who explains the seven steps a good looking woman must take to rise from demure waif to sexy executioner.
The evening is completed by Maccabees who recounts in minute detail the torture and slaughter of her seven sons at the hands of a religiously intolerant King. This final section is where Matthew Hunt’s excellent writing shines the brightest. There is a leanness to this section's style which never allows a single superfluous word or sentence to sidetrack the audience from the horrific and inexorable situation that Maccabees describes. Dramatic monologue writing does not come any better than this.
Nor does acting for that matter as the stunning Linda Marlowe is the sole performer in this play. Linda Marlowe has always been an actress with a wonderful gift for creating colourful and complex characters on stage. Her five transformations here encompass startling changes of age and leap through layers of the class system in one unbelievable, but perfectly pitched, bound after another.
Of course, she is armed with her seemingly limitless brand of acting talent which allows her to perform these character shifts unaided by mammoth costume and make-up changes. In Believe I think Marlowe is assisted by two cardigans and a chair and that is all the help she needs to breathe life into the five remarkable performances she has created.
For me it is the character of Maccabees which really shows her stature as a live performer. Faced with Matthew Hurt’s graphically detailed descriptions of torture and murder, Linda Marlowe reins in the character’s emotions almost to the point of negation. Somehow that rare bird, real theatrical alchemy occurs, as the battered maternal heart of Maccabees is conjured from this dry and emotionless rendering. A lesser performer would have hit the pathos button and ruined the delicate balance of this piece. But Marlowe plays a classier and harder game than that. She doesn’t even give that button a thought.
Believe is an excellent play excellently performed. The main thrust of its subject matter, religious belief, is given the full three dimensional treatment through the medium of the re-told biblical tales of these five women. What tips this play into the Premiere League is the aptness of resonance that these ancient Middle Eastern stories have to life in modern, secular, terrorized, Britain."
Jack Hughes, Rogues and Vagabonds
