AN ECCLESIASTICAL DRAMA.

Press, Volume XLVI, Issue 7268, 26 March 1889, Page 2

AN ECCLESIASTICAL DRAMA.

Although a guild exists to promote harmony in the relations between Church and Stage, and there are to be found several clerical champions of even the ballet, 16 has been reserved to the clergy of St. Peter's, Vauxhall, says the Topical Times, to utilise the boards as a vehicle of instruction in early ecclesiastical history, joined to a means of raising funds for the completion of a church. These gentlemen, together with a company, some forty in number, and composed exclusively of ordained ministers and lay communicants who have been in the habit of helping in Church work, performed recently at the Croydon Public Hall an " Ecclesiastical Drama," called " The Conversion of England," descriptive of St. Augustine's mission to Ethelbert, King of Kent, and the subsequent acceptance of Christianity by the Anglo-Saxons. "The Conversion of England" was written by the. Rev. Henry Cresswell, and though theatrical records give numerous instances of parsons who'were playwrights also, it is believed that this is the first drama of its kind written and produced, in England since the Reformation.' It has been duly sanctioned by the Lord Chamberlain, and was played once before in aid of St. Peter's, Vauxhall.

The piece is in ten tableaux, and after a brief speech from a gentleman in clerical attire, in which he begged the audience to refrain alike from applause or disapprobation, and a hymn, " Hail to the Lord's Anointed," the curtain rose upon a scene representing a group of slaves in Rome. Recollections of historical knowledge acquired from the pages of " Mrs Marknam " flash through the mind, as Gregory says to the slave merchant, " They have the faces of Angels," and goes on with the rest of the Venerable Bede's narrative regarding "De ira" and "Alleluia." A patrician dame buys the boys, gives them to Gregory to set free as her offering at the Shrine of the Apostles, and in answer to their plea to be sent home, he promises that they shall go. The second tableau represents Pagan England, and the merciful but fruitless Intervention of the Christian Queen, Bertha, on behalf of a boy accused of theft. One of the most effective and best acted tableaux was the next, when St. Augustine received his charge from Gregory, and, with the zeal of missionary pride, named his followers, and which introduced the " comic man " of the piece. The conception of the actor to whom this part was entrusted somewhat differed from that of the author, who wished to convey the idea of a humble man mistrusting his own fitness for the great duty, but who was represented aa being in abject terror of his life. In the fourth scene the missionaries are delayed at Lerins, where they meet with a cynical count:. and in the fifth they have fallen upon evil times, having been attacked by robbers in a forest of Anjou, and the curtain descends upon a well-arranged picture of them sleeping, while an angel in the background watches over them. Their avanfcourier is well received by Ethelbert and his council, and the next tableau represents the meeting of the King and the missionaries. Ethelbert's baptism and reception into the Church makes the most gorgeous of the ecclesiastical scenes, and St. Augustine stands with dignified and noble bearing, in a white robe, over which a strange vestment of orange and terra cotta hangs. In the ninth tableau we have the Consecration of St. Augustine as Archbishop, and the closing one shows the bishops of the British Church, which needed some revival In the degenerate state to which it had fallen, somewhat jealously disputing whether they could receive the missionaries whose zeal had done so much; in much the same' fashion that a sleepy and negligent minister would regard the advent in bis parish of a man possessed of extraordinary " earnestness " nowadays. However, collaboration is agreed upon, and all ends happily with singing the 117 th Psalm. The dresses, vestment, and accessories had been copied with great care from early manuscripts and missals, and were archaic and quaint in form and colour. The Rev. Mr Morris, of St. Peter's, is said to be an actor by instinct, and his performance of the part of St. Augustine was marked by solemnity and lmpresslveneas. and the impersonators of Gregory and Qu_e__3-_>rt_-a were also moat successful