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Babylon (Performed at the Rosemary Branch Theatre, 19 September 2013. Script, programme)

Babylon is a full-length play for theatre about the 17th-century prophet, Eleanor Davies. She was a puritan though she did not use that word of herself. Scholars have noted the difficulty of ‘piecing together’ (Porter) the concrete facts of Davies’ turbulent life and world and of understanding her interpretation of events, since the primary source is her dense and cryptic ‘prophetic’ writing. The play involved extensive research using multiple sources combined with much that is invented.

The biographical element was only the preliminary stage of writing the play. Babylon both employs and ruptures the genre of historical epic. In this genre (popularised by Hollywood), historical accuracy is often sacrificed in favour of a larger than life hero, spectacular scenes, a national theme and ambitious historical or religious moments. Some of the scenes in the play provide such moments: the revelatory performance of the deaf-mute boy in the orchard; Davies’ appearance before the High Commissioners; the prison scene in which writing appears on the wall (albeit a digital one); Davies ordaining herself archbishop in Lichfield Cathedral. These scenes are tinged by Davies’ self-dramatising tendencies and verge on the aesthetic excess of which historical epic is sometimes accused (Sobchak).

Other layers rupture the surface of epic narrative. Both Davies and her ideological opponent Queen Henrietta Maria employ the masque form. We are required to witness Davies’ series of transgressive public roles, culminating in her carnivalesque performance in Lichfield Cathedral and the anti-masque in Bedlam. If this is madness it is ‘social madness’ (Hill), a means of thinking the unthinkable and a mode of expression designed, like her prophecies, to cloak as well as reveal Davies’ political stance. The stance itself was not uncommon in the run up to the Civil War. The subject and mode of expression was and still is.