The Wind of Heaven: From Bethlehem to Blestin
3.5 stars
The greatest objection to God has always been emotional. While it is true that the debate over divine non-presence is clothed in the mild-breathed language of logicism and rationality, what stirs in us feeling enough to slacken faith and scorn perdition is the atrociousness of evil and suffering - the feeling that an all-kind, omniscient, and omnipotent God couldn’t possibly exist alongside mothers that must bury their children.
It’s a powerful argument. The Wind of Heaven entertains this notion: its central characters, consciously or not, grapple with the limits of mortal life and all the whips and pangs therein. The play is centred just outside the Welsh mountain village of Blestin, which lost its children a decade ago in an accident of unimaginable cruelty, and sets itself in the aftermath of the Crimean war - the mountain hospital overflows with maimed soldiers, the threat of cholera and typhus never far off. Confronted with such suffering, and with a modern, godless capitalism looming over the not-too-distant horizon (represented here by a fast-talking nouveau-riche Birmingham businessman who owns a circus named after himself), it’s only understandable that the village has no vicar and the church is now a post office.
But then Jesus comes to Blestin in the form of a Welsh teenage peasant. As a widow struggles to contain her grief and our Birmingham businessman confronts his past, the village erupts in a religious revival over a boy who can cure the sick and raise the dead. The Wind of Heaven fundamentally concerns itself with the power faith has to transform, heal and revitalise - and the production does an excellent job of depicting the emotional growth religion stirs in its characters (that the Finborough Theatre is such an intimate venue only heightens the experience).
And yet it feels like a cheat: the play’s power is co-opted from the reverence which even today we offer to, say, the quiet and cold stalls of a church, rather than being generated internally. Upon the interval, after an achingly beautiful Welsh hymnal, I was as ready to preach the gospel as any man alive, but I couldn’t help thinking that a good sermon would have provoked the same response. In fact, it’s a double cheat - by having Jesus raise the dead and cure the sick, the play fails to meaningfully respond to the problem of suffering; even the play’s Doubting Thomas, who argues that the whole fervour is just a case of mass hysteria, can only provide strawman arguments. This a didacticism, not a dialectic.
And yet I can’t write off the play so easily. The production’s well staged, and that the script serves some dubious lines in its religious crusade is only a credit to the cast who pull them off. If this feels like damning with faint praise, it is, but not in the way you think: for all this, I couldn’t help but be moved by the production, and I’m still chewing on it. If I can’t make a rational argument for you to see this, I can certainly make an emotional one.
