On Stage

No one was surprised when plays on religious themes hit their top in popularity in Great Britain during the war. Crowds saw them in shelters, tents, churches. But almost everybody was surprised at the phenomenon that followed: in the year after the war, the morality and miracle play and the historical religious drama had grown, not waned, in popularity. Today they play all over England.

All this was highly gratifying to the Religious Drama Society, which has been operating on a shoestring from a one-room London office. Most pleased of all is the man directly responsible: Elliott Martin Browne, 46, the tall, gaunt director of R.D.S. since 1936. It was he who had prodded T. S. Eliot, poet and High Churchman, to write two of the most popular modern religious plays: The Rock and Murder in the Cathedral.

Last week Martin Browne's R.D.S. gave the cause an added boost. It helped out the Sheffield City Training College in a week-long course in religious drama, joined in instructions and demonstrations that ranged from how to walk on stage to how to produce a play. Said one bespectacled girl: "It's been 100%. Absolutely something for everyone." Sheffield's school was the biggest practical effort the R.D.S. has seen so far. Its success has already led to planning courses like it in three other cities.

Search for Truth. R.D.S. has proved to the average man that religious plays need not be boring. It got the chance during the war, when Browne directed a band of professionals called the Pilgrim Players. Community groups got interested in their morale-builders--Murder in the Cathedral, Geoffrey Whiteworth's Father Noah, Ernest Rhys's The Deluge--decided to do something themselves. Sheffield led the way. In 1943 its interdenominational Association of Christian Communities hired a professional actress as dramatic adviser, has since organized plays with groups varying from mothers' unions to tough boys' clubs in the slums.

R.D.S. does not put on plays, but rents its sets of plays to amateur groups, gives them free dramatic advice. Part of the advice is Martin Browne's definition of the objective of a religious play--and the secret of his success.

Said he last week: there are two ways of approaching a religious play. "Some say it should 'do good' to the audience, and I think most emphatically that that produces the worst kind of nauseatingly sentimental play. People hate to feel that they are having good done to them. . . .I believe you should write a religious play because you want to express the truth, and if you are a Christian, then the truth will be Christian truth."

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