The Secret Rapture

by David Hare

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Exploring Tragedy in Other Works

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When David Hare’s The Secret Rapture opened at the Royal National Theatre in London in October 1988, critics attempted to categorize the play as something familiar. Some pointed to the exaggerated portrayals of the ambitious, self-interested politician, Marion, and her almost clownishly religious businessman husband, Tom, and called the play political satire, or a contemporary comedy of manners. Others recognized the play’s deeply rooted Christian symbolism and termed it a philosophical drama about contemporary life in Britain. Writing for the Sunday Times, John Peter remarked, ‘‘The Secret Rapture is a family play; it is also the first major play to judge the England of the 1980s in terms both human and humane.’’

For his part, the playwright himself was quite direct on the subject of style. In an interview with Robert Crew in the Toronto Star, Hare indicated that he was interested in writing about the psychological effect of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s government on the people of Britain in the form of a tragedy. ‘‘We don’t have many plays with heroines or many tragedies in England at the moment,’’ said Hare. ‘‘It is commonly said that it’s not possible to write a tragedy nowadays and I was interested to see whether it was.’’

Hare had good reason to be uncertain. The classic definition of a tragedy was developed by the ancient Greeks more than 2,000 years ago. While the form was revived successfully by Shakespeare and a few of his contemporaries during the Renaissance, by the turn of the twentieth century, critics and writers alike were declaring tragedy a dead art—something that could still be read in the texts of classical writers but no longer written and performed for modern audiences. In order to determine if Hare succeeded at his task and created a modern tragedy, it is important first to understand the classical definition of the form, then to consider how it has been viewed in more recent years.

The most widespread and accepted classical definition of tragedy was described in 335 B.C.E. by the philosopher Aristotle in his Poetics. As it exists today, the Poetics is an incomplete work that has been translated from its original ancient Greek through many languages and many editions to its current twenty-six-chapter form. In it, Aristotle set out to define tragedy using the plays of classical Greek dramatists like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides as examples. Aristotle’s well-known defi- nition of tragedy appears in chapter 6 of the Poetics:

Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear affecting the proper purgation of these emotions.

As Aristotle explains his definition and provides examples from plays of his time, such as Oedipus the King and Medea, a clearer definition of tragedy emerges that does seem to describe many of the plays of the classical Greeks and Renaissance writers like Shakespeare. A tragedy, Aristotle suggests, is a serious play. Its theme generally has universal interest and appeal. That is, most or all human beings can identify with the play’s concerns and can therefore develop an emotional attachment to the action and characters. The central character, or protagonist , is typically a person of high rank or stature, often a king or nobleman. This protagonist is essentially a good person who experiences some kind of decline in fortune that usually leads to suffering and death. The decline...

(This entire section contains 2516 words.)

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is caused by some error or frailty, referred to as the ‘‘tragic flaw,’’ on the part of the protagonist. Sometime before or during his suffering, the protagonist recognizes and understands his error. And, finally, the downfall of the protagonist arouses emotions such as pity and fear in the audience and effectively purges these emotions through the act ofcatharsis.

The best example of a classical tragedy, according to Aristotle, is Sophocles’s Oedipus the King. In this work, the protagonist is a king who, as a young man, is given a prophecy that he will one day grow up to murder his father and marry his mother. Rather than face this grisly fate, he flees what he thinks is his home and settled in a new land where he inherits a throne, a fortune, and a queen. When his new kingdom is faced with a terrible plague, Oedipus asks the gods for advice, and he is told that he must find the killer of the old king. As evidence and witnesses slowly appear, Oedipus begins to realize that he has made a terrible mistake. The family he ran away from was not his family after all. A man he thought was a ruffian and whom he killed on the road was actually his father, and the queen he married turns out to be his mother. Oedipus’s ‘‘tragic flaw’’ is his pride: he believed he could outwit the gods and escape his fate; then for a while he refuses to see the truth. He recognizes his errors, blinds himself, and then banishes himself into exile. An audience, Aristotle suggests, can easily find pity for Oedipus, particularly as he realizes his mistakes and fear that something similar could happen to them.

In many ways, The Secret Rapture does seem to resemble this classical definition of tragedy. It is undoubtedly a serious play with universal themes. It begins with a funeral and ends with a funeral, and in between it addresses topics such as alcoholism, family loyalty, and obsessive love. These are all concerns that most people can relate to, and they may cause audiences to develop emotional attachments to the characters involved. The central character of the play, Isobel, is not someone of high rank or stature. In fact, the highest-ranking character in the play is probably her sister, Marion, who holds a junior minister’s position in Britain’s government. Still, Isobel is essentially a good person who experiences terrible suffering, followed by a sudden, violent death. Her ‘‘tragic flaw’’ may be her goodness. She is so committed to virtue and to doing what is right that she invites the abuse of those who are not as good as she is.

Isobel does seem to experience a flash of recognition when she understands the error she is making. Just before rejecting Irwin, she tells him, ‘‘I’m being turned into a person whose only function is to suffer. And believe me, it bores me just as much as it bores you.’’ Her insight, however, appears long before her worst suffering and doesn’t seem to affect her in any significant way. Finally, when her downfall arrives and Irwin murders her, it is quite sudden, and she is strong and commanding until the very end, leaving some question as to whether the audience experiences pity and fear for her in some sort of cathartic moment.

Even with all its similarities to classical tragedy, it is clear that The Secret Rapture is a very different play, culturally, than Sophocles’s Oedipus the King or Shakespeare’s Macbeth. On the surface, it may not seem to matter that Isobel is not a queen and that the fate of a kingdom does not hang in the balance. But classical tragedy, according to many critics, does demand more from its characters and its audiences than the ordinary lives of ordinary people. That is why, as Hare observed, ‘‘it is commonly said that it is not possible to write a tragedy nowadays.’’ We may long for the emotional catharsis offered by a well-crafted tragedy, but we are more interested in the lives of these ordinary people and the way they parallel our own than in the lives of remote kings in even remoter kingdoms.

It is this cultural contradiction that led to the belief, for much of the twentieth century, that tragedies can no longer be written. In a famous 1929 essay titled ‘‘The Tragic Fallacy,’’ Joseph Wood Krutch declared, ‘‘Tragedies, in that only sense of the word which has any distinctive meaning, are no longer written in either the dramatic or any other form.’’ Krutch believed that tragedies could not exist in their pure form in the twentieth century because the view most people held of themselves and the world had changed so drastically. ‘‘If the plays and the novels of today deal with littler people and less mighty emotions,’’ Krutch maintained, ‘‘it is not because we have become interested in commonplace souls and their unglamorous adventures but because we have come, willy-nilly, to see the soul of man as commonplace and its emotions as mean.’’

Krutch believed that true writers of tragedy cast their plays with kings and set them in courts and on battlefields because they really believed in human greatness and that we now cast plays with common people and set them in houses and shops because we no longer believe in nobility, either its outward appearance or its inner virtue. To illustrate his point, he compared Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which a Danish prince seeks revenge on an uncle who murdered his father and stole his throne, to Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, in which a plain young man discovers he inherited syphilis from his father, returns to his little village, and persuades his mother to poison him. Although the experiences of Ibsen’s protagonist in Ghosts may be closer to reality for most people, Krutch insists that the play cannot be a tragedy, because it lacks the noble spirit and does not end in an uplifting or cathartic way.

Quite likely, though, Hare was less concerned with a strict, classical interpretation of tragedy when he wrote The Secret Rapture and more concerned with how the play would resonate with his London audiences in 1988. On a scale ranging from Sophocles to Shakespeare to Ibsen, his style is undoubtedly more similar to that of the author of Ghosts than to the two playwrights whose lives were more affected by the comings and goings of kings and kingdoms. Yet by a more recent definition of tragedy, he still may have succeeded at his task.

In 1949, just after his masterpiece Death of a Salesman opened on Broadway, American playwright Arthur Miller wrote an essay for the New York Times called ‘‘Tragedy and the Common Man.’’ Miller had been taken to task, by critics who thought like Krutch, for calling Death of a Salesman a tragedy. In his essay, Miller defended not only his play but tragedy itself as a form of drama perfectly accessible to modern playwrights and audiences.

Miller rejected the notion that tragedies must be written about and for noblemen. ‘‘I believe that the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were,’’ he stated. Far from having to exact murderous revenge or save a kingdom, Miller felt that tragic protagonists earned the title simply from struggling to find their rightful place in society. And instead of needing fate, the gods, or some catastrophic event to prompt them into action, Miller suggested, ‘‘the fateful wound from which the inevitable events spiral is the wound of indignity, and its dominant force is indignation.’’

The ‘‘tragic flaw’’ in a character, then, could simply be the character’s insistence on maintaining his or her dignity, sometimes in the face of overwhelming odds. It is this struggle between the ordinary individual and the world around us, Miller suggests, that creates the pity and the fear normally connected with tragedy. Miller wrote:

The tragic right is a condition of life, a condition in which the human personality is able to flower and realize itself. The wrong is the condition which suppresses man, perverts the flowing out of his love and creative instinct. Tragedy enlightens—and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man’s freedom. The thrust for freedom is the quality in tragedy which exalts. The revolutionary questioning of the stable environment is what terrifies.

Miller believed that, in the end, the tragic protagonist’s struggle, though doomed to failure, suggests optimism and reinforces the best qualities of human existence. Perhaps most important of all, it conveys a belief in the continual evolution and perfectibility of all humankind, kings and commoners alike.

Viewed through this critical lens, The Secret Rapture appears much closer to Miller’s definition of tragedy for the common man than to Aristotle’s noble art form. Isobel is certainly an ordinary enough person, particularly as compared to the other characters in the play. While her sister Marion is a fastclimbing politician in the national spotlight and Tom is a born-again successful and wealthy businessman, Isobel is content to operate a small graphic design company and tend to the needs of her family and friends.

Although she seems to weather most storms rather well, Isobel nevertheless suffers many indignities in the course of the play. She is initially coerced into taking care of Katherine and offering her a job, only to be betrayed by her again and again. No one seems prepared to honor the memory of Robert Glass, her father, the way she feels it should be honored. At one point she is forced to plead with Irwin, ‘‘Are we not allowed to mourn? Just . . . a decent period of mourning? Can’t we have that?’’

Perhaps worst of all, Irwin betrays her to Marion and Tom when he deals with them behind her back and accepts a salary increase to convince Isobel to accept their business offer. The cumulative effect of all this mistreatment is a tremendous assault on Isobel’s dignity, Miller’s ‘‘fateful wound, from which the inevitable events’’ of the play spiral. Isobel’s indignation at this treatment causes her to rebel against the world around her. She completely shuns Irwin, ignores her floundering business, and turns to the work she believes her father would appreciate: taking care of Katherine.

Whether it seems to the rest of us that Isobel has made a wise choice or not, her choice is definitely a decision to spurn the ‘‘stable environment’’ offered by Marion, Tom, and Irwin, and to thrust for the freedom she believes she will find in doing what she thinks is right. In the end, Isobel’s earthly struggle does fail, but we are left with a faint sense of optimism—the impression that Isobel’s sacrifice has affected the lives of those around her for the better. Marion’s final words, some of the last words of the play, suggest Miller’s notion of evolution and human perfectibility. ‘‘Isobel,’’ she cries. ‘‘We’re just beginning.’’

With that, the tragedy is complete. Isobel, a common person, a good person to the very end, has wielded her virtue and fought for her dignity against a world that seems to care only for itself and its profits; and in the struggle, she has changed that world, if only a little bit.

Source: Lane A. Glenn, Critical Essay on The Secret Rapture, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.

Saint Isobel: David Hare’s The Secret Rapture as Christian Allegory

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If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you. (John 15:19)

In his latest play, The Secret Rapture, David Hare has given us a central character, Isobel, who is distinctly not of the world. Even her name, a variant of Elizabeth, has as one of its meanings ‘‘consecrated to God.’’ Dramatically, Hare took a great risk in centering his play on Isobel. She is weak, pliable and abused (a stark contrast to Hare’s usual headstrong women such as Susan in Plenty or Peggy in A Map of the World), yet in order for the climax to have any impact, we must feel that something has been accomplished by her destruction, not that she has been one of life’s doormats who deserves what she gets. If Isobel were merely a good woman who could not exist in a corrupt world the necessary sense of loss at her death might not be evoked, but Hare has raised her to the level of saint and martyr. Her death has a purging effect on the other characters, so that while there is loss there is also hope.

Hare begins to establish Isobel’s spirituality in the first moments of the play. Isobel, sitting with the body of her recently deceased father, tells her sister Marion:

There’s actually a moment when you see the spirit depart from the body. I’ve always been told about it. And it’s true. (She is very quiet and still.) Like a bird.

While Hare develops Isobel’s spiritual nature, he places in contrast to her several varieties of rather earth-bound sinners, each traveling down a different path in search of salvation. Marion, the elder sister, is a Tory junior minister entirely caught up in materialism and the exhilaration of power. It is by way of this character that Hare most directly voices his familiar political dissent. Marion is so extreme in her right-wing views that she needs no opposition to make her look the fool; she is quite capable of doing it herself, as when she proudly relates her retort to members of the Green Party who opposed her standpoint on nuclear energy: ‘‘‘Come back and see me when you’re glowing in the dark.’’’

As we meet Marion she is trying to recover a ring which she had given to her father. In justifying her actions to Isobel (who, significantly, in no way indicates that she requires justification), she explains:

For God’s sake, I mean, the ring is actually valuable. Actually no, that sounds horrid. I apologize. I’ll tell you the truth. I thought when I bought it—I just walked into this very expensive shop and I thought, this is one of the few really decent things I’ve done in my life. And it’s true. I spent, as it happens, a great deal of money, rather more . . . rather more than I had at the time. I went too far. I wanted something to express my love for my father. Something adequate.

Marion cannot express her feelings emotionally; instead, she equates love with a valuable object. The speech also puts Isobel in the role of confessor. Marion is driven to confess by her own guilt—guilt which she experiences because she is in the presence of such goodness. Isobel never criticizes Marion, and even agrees that she should have the ring, yet later in the scene we find that Marion is still tormented by guilt:

MARION I’m not going to forgive you.

ISOBEL What?

MARION You’ve tried to humiliate me.

ISOBEL Marion . . .

MARION You’ve made me feel awful. It’s not my fault about the ring. Or the way I feel about Katherine. You make me feel as if I’m always in the wrong.

ISOBEL Not at all.

MARION Oh, yes. Well, we can’t all be perfect. We do try. The rest of us are trying. So will you please stop this endless criticism? Because I honestly think it’s driving me mad.

It is Marion who has been seeking forgiveness, indeed, absolution, of Isobel. When she senses that her sins have not been cleansed, she turns her guilt outward and blames the confessor. Saints, it appears, can be very difficult to live with.

The second sinner in Hare’s catalogue is Marion’s husband Tom, a born-again Christian and Chairman of a committee which strives ‘‘to do business the way Jesus would have done it.’’ Tom is a rather comical example of one who uses scripture to his own advantage. The Lord has indeed moved in mysterious ways when Tom, in the first scene, explains to Isobel how the Lord Jesus delivered the exact automobile parts he needed in order to repair his car so that he could give Marion the news of her father’s death:

TOM [ . . . ] I go to the car. Won’t start. I open the bonnet. Spark-plug leads have perished. I can’t believe it. I think, what on earth am I going to do? Then I think, hey, six days ago an old mate called in and left, in a shopping bag, a whole load of spare parts he’d had to buy for his car. (He smiles in anticipation of the outcome.) And, you know, as I go in and look for it, I tell you this, I don’t have a doubt. As I move towards the bag. I’ve never looked inside it and yet I know. It’s got so I know. I know that inside that bag there is going to be a set of Ford Granada leads. And then you have to say, well, there you are, that’s it, that’s the Lord Jesus. He’s there when you need him. I am looked after.

In addition to exploiting his comic value, Hare uses Tom to highlight Isobel’s authentic Christian existence, which, interestingly, does not seem to include Christ. Isobel rather rejects Christian ideology at every turn. She is politely skeptical of Tom’s faith, but more significantly, she fights against being placed in the roles of saint, martyr and savior which the other characters in the play, particularly her lover Irwin, would have her take on. Her strongest denial of these roles occurs in her last scene as she rejects Irwin’s desperate effort to reinstate himself into her graces:

ISOBEL [ . . . ] And you have this idea that I can’t accept.

IRWIN What’s that? (She looks hard at him a moment.)

ISOBEL You want to be saved through another person. (There’s a silence.)

IRWIN And?

ISOBEL It isn’t possible.

Despite her protestations, Isobel makes one deliberate choice during the action of the play, and that is to forsake her own well-being by taking upon herself a burden, a cross to bear; specifically, a soul to save. Until she makes this choice she is an inactive character playing no part in her own destiny—indeed, a doormat. The burden which Isobel chooses to take upon herself is Katherine, her father’s young widow. Katherine represents the Lost Soul and therefore the greatest challenge to those who would be saviors:

And Levi made him a great feast in his own house: and there was a great company of publicans and of others that sat down with them.

But their scribes and Pharisees murmured against his disciples, saying, Why do ye eat and drink with publicans and sinners?

And Jesus, answering, said unto them, They that are whole need not a physician; but they that are sick.

I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. (Luke 5:29–32)

It is not the part of Jesus that Isobel has consciously chosen to play, but that of her father Robert. Katherine sets herself up as the soul in need of salvation, naming Robert as her benefactor and personal savior, and indirectly challenges Isobel to carry on for her father:

KATHERINE [ . . . ] I met your father first in the Vale of Evesham. Yeah, he stopped one night in a motel. It was appalling. I don’t know how I’d ended up there. I was working the bar. Trying to pick men up—not even for money, but because I was so unhappy with myself. I wanted something to happen. I don’t know how I thought these men might help me, they were travellers, small goods, that sort of thing, all with slack bellies and smelling of late-night curries. I can still smell them. I don’t know why, I’d been doing it for weeks. Then Robert came in. He said ‘I’ll drive you to Gloucestershire. It will give you some peace.’ He brought me here, to this house. He put fresh sheets in the spare room. Everything I did, before or since, he forgave. (She sits, tears in her eyes, quite now.) People say I took advantage of his decency. But what are good people for? They’re here to help the trashy people like me.

A moment later, after a significant pause, Isobel decides to take Katherine into her home and into her graphic arts firm. That Katherine is an alcoholic, unqualified, unsocialized and irresponsible, are flaws which Isobel chooses to ignore, although she is well aware of them. Whereas Marion could only show her devotion to their father in materialistic terms, Isobel will show it through emulation of his good works. If Robert could unconditionally forgive all of Katherine’s sins, then Isobel will too, even if it leads to her own destruction.

From the moment of Isobel’s decision at the end of Scene ii, the action of The Secret Rapture roughly parallels that of the life of Jesus, with Isobel in the title role and Irwin playing the part of Judas. At the meeting in Robert’s house in Scene iv Isobel is being persuaded to sign her business over to a board of directors headed by Tom. There is a great sense that Tom, Marion and Katherine have conspired against her, but she still has one ally, Irwin— or so she thinks. As Irwin walks into the living room he greets Isobel and Hare’s stage directions read: ‘‘He kisses her cheek before going to sit down.’’ It is the kiss of Judas, of betrayal. Irwin, it is revealed a few pages later, has sided with the others in exchange for a doubled salary, the thirty pieces of silver of the modern world.

What follows is one of the more problematic aspects of the play. Isobel can easily refuse to sign the agreement; Tom, Marion, Katherine and Rhonda (Marion’s assistant) have even left the stage, thus removing the immediate pressure to sign. This is the moment when we must, in order to have compassion for Isobel, feel that when she signs the agreement she does so not because she is weak and resigned to the will of others, but because she accepts the destiny which has been written for her. Isobel here stands before an invisible Pilate and refuses to state her case and save her own life. The agreement which she will sign when the lights go down at the end of the act amounts to a renunciation of her creative and financial independence, a stripping away of both her earthly possessions and her worth as a human being. By signing, Isobel makes it convenient for the others to relegate her to the background and effect her metaphorical death.

In trying to justify his betrayal and gain Isobel’s forgiveness, Irwin points out Isobel’s own share of the blame, and by her silence, Isobel accepts not the blame but the futility of engaging in a struggle for self-preservation:

IRWIN Isobel, please. Just look at me. Please. (She doesn’t turn.) Things move on. You brought in Katherine. Be fair, it was you. It changed the nature of the firm. For better or worse. But it’s changed. And you did it. Not me. (There is silence.) I wouldn’t hurt you. You know that. I’d rather die than see you hurt. I love you. I want you. There’s not a moment when I don’t want you.

Irwin proceeds to suffer a fall from grace to which he will never be restored, and he undergoes an immediate character change. Suddenly he becomes obsessed with gaining love and approval from Isobel, and at the same time his sins multiply. It is as if he is competing with Katherine for Isobel’s love by trying to prove himself more needy, since he knows he is not worthy. The second act opens with Irwin, immediately after having made the above pledge of devotion, flirting with a skimpily-clad Rhonda. They are unmistakably on the verge of physical intimacy when Isobel walks in. Isobel recognizes Irwin’s action as a call for her attention but rather than oblige him, as she constantly obliges Katherine, she withdraws. Irwin then plays, as Hare puts it, his strong hand—he confronts Isobel with the truth about Katherine:

IRWIN I know, you think she’s just unhappy. She’s maladjusted. She hates herself. Well, she does. And she is. All these things are true. But also it’s true, Isobel, my dear, you must learn something else. That everyone knows except you. It’s time you were told. There’s such a thing as evil. You’re dealing with evil. (ISOBEL turns round, about to speak.) That’s right. And if you don’t admit it, then you can’t fight it. And if you don’t fight it, you’re going to lose.

It is my sense that Isobel knows full well that she is going to lose to the force of evil as embodied in Katherine, but her need to sacrifice herself in the attempt to save Katherine’s soul overpowers any desire she might have to save her own skin. At this point in the play Katherine has already destroyed Isobel’s independence, her business, and her love affair; there is not much more she can take except Isobel’s life. Isobel must decide whether to give it to her or not, and in the next scene she reveals the decision she has made to Tom and Marion while on a meditative retreat to Lanzarote:

ISOBEL [ . . . ] You can’t get away. You think you can. You think you’ll fly out. Just leave. Damn the lot of you, and go. Then you think, here I am, stark naked, sky-blue sea, miles of sand—I’ve done it! I’m free! Then you think, yes, just remind me, what am I meant to do now? (She stands, a mile away in a world of her own.) In my case there’s only one answer. (She looks absently at them, as if they were not even present.) I must do what Dad would have wished. (She turns, as if this were self-evident.) That’s it.

Whether or not one cares to extend the immediate meaning of ‘‘Dad’’ beyond Robert to God the Father, it is clear that Isobel has put herself in the same position in relation to her father that Jesus held in relation to the Holy Father: she intends to be his emissary on earth.

Irwin has sensed the sort of experience Isobel has had, and earlier in the scene he tells Marion that he believes Isobel has taken a vow. A parallel can certainly be drawn between Isobel’s escape to Lanzarote and the transfiguration of Jesus which occurred on his sojourn to the mountain; Jesus, too, is instructed by his heavenly father and given a clear sense of purpose, and while ‘‘his raiment became shining, exceeding white as snow’’ (Mark 9:3), Hare brings Isobel into the scene with the direction ‘‘She is also changed. She wears a long dark blue overcoat and thin glasses.’’ Indeed, Isobel does seem to have taken vows, not only to continue caring for Katherine, but in the sense that a novice takes vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. The next scene finds her serving Katherine in a sparsely furnished flat and eating a simple meal of shepherd’s pie. Katherine rejects the food, saying: ‘‘Your cooking is unspeakable. It’s all good intentions. F— shepherd’s pie. It sums you up.’’ On one level we have Isobel compared to a bland plate of mashed potatoes and ground meat, and as a surface appraisal of Isobel’s character, it is not far from the mark. Isobel lacks the volatility of Katherine, the outrageous single-mindedness of Marion, and the sensuality of Rhonda. She possesses instead a quiet strength, easily mistaken for banality. The additional comment about ‘‘good intentions,’’ however, invites a play on the word ‘‘shepherd.’’ Isobel, after all, has become Katherine’s shepherd, her caretaker, her guardian.

Marion’s reaction to the idea of a vow is both comic and revealing. That promises are things meant to be made, not kept, is evident in her response to Irwin:

MARION I don’t believe this. This is most peculiar. What is this? A vow? It’s outrageous. People making vows. What are vows? Nobody’s made vows since the nineteenth century.

Surely Marion vowed a thing or two on her rise up the political ladder, but actual integrity is a concept quite foreign to her. We have seen in her speech about the ring just how many false passes she makes before she hits upon the truth, but a trait which may be merely an amusing character flaw in others is far more devastating in an influential politician.

It is worthwhile here to take a step back to the first scene in the play. Marion has asserted that Katherine took advantage of Robert’s kindness and love. Isobel responds: ‘‘Honestly, I don’t think it matters much. The great thing is to love. If you’re loved back then it’s a bonus.’’

A comparison of two translations of a familiar passage from the first Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians provides some interesting insight into Isobel’s statement and into her decision to sacrifice herself to Katherine. The first is from the King James Version; the second, from the New American Bible:

Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up.

Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;

Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;

Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. [ . . . ]

And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. (I Cor. 13:4–7, 13)

Love is patient; love is kind. Love is not jealous, it does not put on airs, it is not snobbish. Love is never rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not prone to anger; neither does it brood over injuries. Love does not rejoice in what is wrong but rejoices with the truth. There is no limit to love’s forbearance, to its trust, its hope, its power to endure. [ . . . ]

There are in the end three things that last: faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love. (NAB I Cor. 13:4–7, 13)

The retranslation of the term ‘‘charity’’ as ‘‘love’’ in the second passage clearly expresses Isobel’s attitude towards Katherine. Her love is unconditional and charitable and fulfills all of the conditions set forth by Paul. The more difficult Katherine makes it to be loved, the more Isobel must love her; her forbearance is truly limitless. Irwin’s love for Isobel, on the other hand, is selfcentered and self-serving; it lacks the quality of charity. He loves Isobel because she is good, but unless he can love that which is not good, his love is without meaning. In his last scene with Isobel, Irwin in his desperation has strayed so far from the true definition of love that he mistakes it for sex and begs Isobel to sleep with him. Isobel, however, continues to refuse him the salvation he seeks:

ISOBEL Force me. You can force me if you like. Why not? You can take me here. On the bed. On the floor. You can f— me till the morning. You can f— me all tomorrow. Then the whole week. At the end you can shoot me and hold my heart in your hand. You still won’t have what you want. (Her gaze does not wander.) The bit that you want I’m not giving you.

The Sacred Heart imagery in this speech is not accidental. Isobel is playing out the final moments of her drama, and as she notes with some amusement when her hour has come, ‘‘I haven’t got shoes. Still you can’t have everything.’’ The belief that Jesus walked to his crucifixion without shoes, although not specified in the gospels, is common; for example, note this passage from Waiting for Godot:

ESTRAGON (turning to look at the boots.) I’m leaving them there. (Pause.) Another will come, just as . . . as . . . as me, but with smaller feet, and they’ll make him happy.

VLADIMIR But you can’t go barefoot!

ESTRAGON Christ did.

VLADIMIR Christ! What has Christ got to do with it? You’re not going to compare yourself to Christ!

ESTRAGON All my life I’ve compared myself to him.

Christian teaching demands that each of its followers compare himself to Christ and re-enact, throughout his life and at various times of the year, certain of the events of Jesus’ life. Isobel, while never making the comparison between Christ and herself, has led a truly Christian existence. That she must be destroyed while Katherine, the sinner, goes free is an indication that spiritual goodness cannot coexist with the material world. Her death becomes sacrificial, as the crucifixion of Jesus is felt to have been: it is the blood of the lamb which whitens the robes (Rev. 7:14).

Irwin’s reaction immediately after he shoots Isobel is perplexing: ‘‘It’s over. Thank God.’’ After spending the past two scenes virtually deranged because he can’t have the woman he professes to love, it seems odd that he should be relieved by her death. Perhaps he has destroyed his only means of salvation, as he views Isobel to be. But he has released his burden as well. His cross—trying to live up to Isobel’s standards—has been a hard one to bear. ‘‘I have no worth,’’ he tells Isobel at his most desperate moment. ‘‘I can’t feel my worth. When I was with you, it was there.’’ Isobel in fact brought happiness to no one during her life. The pain of impossible love suffered by the offstage character Gordon is one manifestation of this. As Marion tells her:

MARION [ . . . ] Everywhere you go, there are arguments. God, how I hate all this human stuff. Wherever you go, you cause misery. People crying, people not talking. It overwhelms me. Because you can’t just live. Why can’t you live, like other people?

Alternatively or perhaps additionally, Irwin’s ejaculation may be an expression of relief because Isobel has been released from her trials and been made, finally, pure spirit. Gospel text of Jesus’ final words on the cross vary widely. Matthew and Mark record the very human plea, ‘‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’’ (Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34), while that set down in Luke lacks desperation but still betrays human concerns: ‘‘Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit’’ (Luke 23:46). John, however, provides the simplest and perhaps most spiritual report of the last words spoken by Jesus before the resurrection: ‘‘It is finished’’ (John 19:30). In accordance with the dramatic motif of the Gospel of John which will be discussed below, these words end the action of Jesus’ life on earth, but they signify the joy of being freed of the corporal as well. When asked about the meaning of the title of the play David Hare responded, ‘‘It’s that moment at which a nun expects to be united with Christ. In other words, it’s death.’’ Placed in the context of Christianity death becomes a blissful experience, the happy reward for a life of suffering, and Irwin’s strange gratitude makes sense.

Although her presence on earth created division and misery, Isobel’s death has ironically had a cleansing effect on the other characters. Once she is gone a certain peace does take hold of them. It seems that, despite her declaration to Irwin that one could not be saved through another person, salvation does indeed take place. In the last scene Tom, Marion and Katherine restore Robert’s house as though it were a shrine to him and Isobel. In a manner reminiscent of the walk to Calvary, the villagers, we are informed, want to walk to the funeral en masse. Marion and Katherine, heretofore bitter enemies or worse, self-serving allies joined against Isobel, share a closeness which they had never before experienced, and while Tom declares, ‘‘I’ve slightly lost touch with the Lord Jesus’’, we know it is only Jesus the Businessman he is abandoning. Passion, too, is restored to Marion and Tom as they reaffirm a love and desire for one another that has not been evident before the final moments of the play. Overall there is a sense of health, of well-being. At last Isobel’s worth is recognized, and as the play closes Marion attempts to resurrect her sister: ‘‘Isobel. We’re just beginning. Isobel, where are you? (She waits a moment.) Isobel, why don’t you come home?’’

Hare ends the text of the play here, but interestingly, in the National Theatre of Great Britain production directed by Howard Davies, Isobel is successfully resurrected. She appears upstage on a diagonal from Marion, and both sisters have their arms outstretched and are moving towards one another. Davies’s addition leaves one with a very strong sense that Isobel has in fact experienced the Secret Rapture.

Thematically, The Secret Rapture marks something of a departure for Hare. He has seldom failed to include politics in his work, and overt references to England’s economy do exist in the play; for example, the question of the ethics behind investments is raised, and Scene vi largely concerns Isobel’s realization that her business has been used as a tax write-off. A strictly political interpretation, however, yields rather unsatisfying results. One theatre monthly ironically titled its cover story preceding the New York production, ‘‘A Kinder, Gentler David Hare,’’ and we may well wonder what sort of socio-political statement the playwright intended to make. This is not to say that Hare needs to provide answers in his plays, nor has it been his practice to do so. His preferred style has been to present the problem and allow the audience to draw the conclusions. A Map of the World (1982) intelligently presents a dialectic on poverty in developing countries while at the same time allowing the cracks in both sides to be seen. Fanshen (1976) tells of both fine intentions and resultant failure during economic reform in China. But The Secret Rapture is politically a one-sided play, pitting Isobel’s innocence and goodness against Marion as quintessential Tory capitalist, and it works thematically only until the last scene. It is one thing to destroy the last vestige of pre-Thatcher England and quite another to depict the hawk as turning vegetarian after it has had its chicken dinner. The political dimension here seems almost obligatory; Hare knows that the best arguments give some credence to the opposition, and Marion is too much of a caricature to be taken seriously. True, greed, short-sightedness and the perverse passion for ‘‘clambering on the back [of the gravy train] and joining in the fun’’ are the elements which caused the corruption of Irwin and the destruction of Isobel. But Isobel, eternally passive, might have been taken down by much weaker forces. The Good Individual is rarely suffered to exist, and Jesus is but one example from history of this phenomenon; several others come from the realm of public service. Yet Marion’s remorse makes Hare’s ending, if taken politically, seem naïvely optimistic. Surely we are not to conclude that the loss of an individual will shake the conscience of the oppressors, or that passive resistance will eventually win the war. Hare explains his new concerns in The Secret Rapture this way:

[I]t became clear that personal character is more important to me than ideology. My anger about what’s happened to English society didn’t change. The diffi- culty of changing people became more clear. I’m bored by propaganda, either from the left or right. But goodness makes me weep. I see Isobel that way. So I said, Why don’t I write about goodness? Why be a smartass?

Although some have suggested that Hare titled his play more for its cryptic resonance than with intent to suggest a parable, these words, taken together with the title, make it difficult to ignore the validity of the analysis given here. In choosing to write about goodness, Hare could find no parallel with which his audience would be more familiar than the drama of Jesus.

It is not inappropriate to discuss the life of Jesus in dramatic terms as I have done here. The Gospel According to John introduces the concept that Jesus’ betrayal was divinely scripted:

I speak not of you all: I know whom I have chosen: but that the scripture may be fulfilled, He that eateth bread with me hath lifted up his heel against me. [ . . . ] Simon Peter therefore beckoned to him, that he should ask who it should be of whom he spake.

He then lying on Jesus’ breast saith unto him, Lord, who is it? Jesus answered, He it is, to whom I shall give a sop, when I have dipped it. And when he had dipped the sop, he gave it to Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon.

And after the sop Satan entered into him. Then said Jesus unto him, That thou doest, do quickly. [ . . . ]

He then having received the sop went immediately out: and it was night. Therefore, when he was gone out, Jesus said, Now is the Son of man glorified, and God is glorified in him. (John 13:18, 24–27, 30–31)

John differs from the synoptic gospels in that here Jesus purposely places Satan into the body of Judas in order to fulfill the predetermined terms of the Scriptures; that is, so that the drama can unfold as written. The Secret Rapture is of course a drama, but in addition to the usual dictates of characters fulfilling roles, we have Isobel’s choice to enact a specific part leading towards a specific and predestined end. We can question, as with Jerry in Albee’s The Zoo Story, whether or not Isobel has knowingly moved towards her own demise. The answer in Hare’s play is that it can at least be said of Isobel that she does nothing to rewrite the script. The play opens with Isobel as a figure of goodness and she remains so throughout, significantly, while everything around her changes. She comes to a crossroads where she has the option to abandon her destiny, yet she chooses to follow the path laid out for her by some Divine Playwright, ostensibly her father. It is her devotion to her role and her refusal to accommodate her own worldly needs that entitle Isobel to the status of saint.

Source: Liorah Anne Golomb, ‘‘Saint Isobel: David Hare’s The Secret Rapture as Christian Allegory,’’ in Modern Drama, Vol. XXXIII, No. 4, December 1990, pp. 563–74.

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