Young Thomas Aikenhead was the last person executed for blasphemy in Britain. In his own words, written while in prison, he was “betrayed and induced to the reading of... atheistical books” by a supposed friend, who subsequently gave witness against him. “Out of a pure love to truth,” wrote Thomas, he had tried to find “any grounds really sufficient to confirm” Christian teachings but found only “for the contrair”. His mistake, in a 1690s Edinburgh still reverberating from the shocks to church and state of the Jacobite uprising, was to speak his thoughts in public. For this he was tried (without defence counsel), condemned and, on 8 January 1697, aged just 20 years old, hanged on a gibbet.
As the “Je suis Charlie”-referencing title suggests, this new, music theatre production places Thomas’s story in a wider context of attacks on freedom of speech through the ages. It’s a well-meant idea, but the execution is chaotic – a gallimaufry of incidents in a yet-to-be digested mix of theatrical styles from Dario Fo to Monty Python via Bertolt Brecht.
Thomas is played by all eight cast members in rotation and mostly portrayed as a 20th-century-style singer-songwriter, although sometimes as Christ and, once, with a hint of Galileo (the man and the Brecht play). His story is spliced with that of his prosecutor (in 17th-century wig and coat), whose mother is shown being executed by drowning for refusing to speak church- and state-appeasing words (a scene played twice to the accompaniment of a song hauntingly keened by Myra McFadyen). The action is punctuated by a Match of the Day-style commentary. An unidentified character in a feathered bowler interposes beautiful, African-sounding chants (riveting John Pfumojena). In the confusion of factual and fantastical, Thomas’s situation becomes trivialised.
While I admire the intentions behind this four-theatre co-production – directed by Paul Hunter, composed by Iain Johnstone, with lyrics by Simon Armitage – I feel that work so ambitious needs more time to grow than today’s economics allow.
• Touring to the Salisbury Playhouse, 8 to 12 March, and the Royal Lyceum theatre, Edinburgh, 23 March to 9 April
