Theater: A God-Intoxicated Man

Luther, by John Osborne. Every age paints the portrait of past genius in its own image. The convention of the 20th century is that a genius must be tortured. He must be physically or psychologically ill, agonizingly unsure of himself, seething with inner violence, driven by morbid fears and furies, restless beyond a dream of peace, a man who draws his breath in pain and his inspiration from despair. If he is a hero, it is in spite of his weaknesses, not because of his strengths. If this hero is a religious genius, he must display an absolute conviction of sin and guilt, a faith ever prone to anguished doubt.

This is John Osborne’s Martin Luther, modern, distinctly dramatic, and very much the playwright’s own speculative creation, though modeled on historical fact. After a compelling evening with this Luther, incandescently acted by Albert Finney, one knows that one has seen a hugely tormented Promethean rebel. It is rather less certain that one has been in the presence of a towering Christian and the prime mover and shaper of the Reformation.

The play moves like a storm between two anchoring calms. It begins in the cloistered serenity of a monastery in 1506, as Brother Martin kneels in submissive piety to receive the monk’s habit of the Augustinian Order of Eremites. It ends 21 years later in a secularized cloister in Wittenberg with the married Luther, his fierce fires banked in domesticity, cradling his infant son as he walks the night much like any other father. In between are the earthquake blows with which Luther split the earthly crust of Christendom.

A panoramic saga of this kind tends to break down into images, episodes and historic tableaux. Act I is devoted more to atmosphere scenting than soul shaking. However, Albert Finney achieves one powerful revelatory moment. He breaks from the company of his chanting fellow monks with his body arched in contortion, his mouth twisted and strangulated with epileptic sounds, the seeming bearer of some supernatural vision or message that he cannot articulate. After that, it is difficult to think of Luther except as possessed, obsessed, and intoxicated by God.

Act II is vividly theatrical and sets the drama surging. It begins with a colorful scene of indulgence peddling, the churchly abuse that first roused Luther’s ire. With drums beating, trumpets blaring and cash boxes gaping, the porcine, goggle-eyed monk Tetzel (Peter Bull) dips a grasping tentacle into every pocket as he makes a carnival-pitchman’s promise of pardon for sins committed or intended by persons living or dead, provided one buys a letter of indulgence. After Luther nails his 95 theses to the Wittenberg door, he is summoned by the papal legate Cajetan (John Moffatt). Cajetan is a sly Roman cat who hopes to toy with a provincial mouse. Instead he faces a German mas tiff, correct but bristling. Cajetan employs tact, diplomacy, the accumulated wisdom of the church. Held in the awe some grip of revealed truth, Luther will not budge unless he can be refuted by Scripture. Cajetan pleads with him not to rend the seamless unity of the Christian world: “I beg of you, my son, retract.” With nerves clenched more tightly than his teeth, Luther answers: “Most worthy father, I cannot.” The papal bull of condemnation follows, and

Luther mounts the pulpit in Wittenberg clutching it like an eagle clawing at carrion and roars out his virulent anath ema at the Pope and Rome.

After this, most of Act III seems flat and anticlimactic, except for Luther’s dramatic defiance at the Diet of Worms. Osborne commits one major error, partly of taste but more pertinently of judgment, by harping continuously on Luther’s constipation and visceral distress. This creates the absurd impression that Protestantism owes more to Luther’s intestine than to his intellect, and it pays a mindless slight to a matchless theologian. If Luther sometimes falters, Albert Finney never does. White of face and white-hot in fervor, he seems to stand in a beam cast by the eye of God, an eye that narrows on him like a magnifying glass bringing the sun to a bead of intensity, and in that bead of light Finney’s Luther bursts inextinguishably into flame.