Unsworth's Morality Play

Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Monday, September 06, 2004
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My first introduction to Barry Unsworth came from the film version of Pascali's Island, though at the time I had no idea it was an introduction at all. The movie starred Ben Kingsley, Charles Dance and Helen Mirren, and I was utterly transfixed. It was one of a string of movies I saw in college, over the course of a winter term when my roommates were away. I attended classes on Shakespeare and the French Revolution during the day and watched movies all night. Pascali's Island was one of the best. But it wasn't until 1998, when I read Unsworth's Stone Virgin and Rage of the Vulture that I realized he was also the author of the book on which that well-remembered movie was based. I suppose that discovery catapulted Unsworth to the top of my pantheon of contemporary writers, because I happily devoured a number of his books soon after: Sacred Hunger, Mooncranker's Gift, Sugar and Rum and others. But it was only yesterday that I read Morality Play.

Although it is brief (just 200 pages) and lacks the complexity of some of Unsworth's books, Morality Play is an incredible read. The story revolves around Nicholas Barber, a fugitive priest in fourteenth century England who falls in with a band of theatrical players straight out of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal. Out of money, the tragedians abandon their stock of familiar mystery plays for an improvised piece based on the real-life murder of a boy named Thomas Wells. This is a frightening departure for the troupe, since Wells was killed only a few days before and the reported circumstaces of his death are well-known to the audience (which at one point includes the boy's mother). Each time they perform the play, the actors discover more problems with the "official" version and, though much questioning, they discover the true mystery behind the death of Wells and four other boys. As the description suggests, Morality Play is part historical novel and part detective story, though the history and the detection slide into the background before the novel's real core: the recounting of the play's three performances and the paradoxical idea that by acting out parts we can arrive at truth. For readers who have thus far denied themselves the pleasure of Unsworth, Morality Play would make an interesting and accessible introduction. Apparently, there was a recent film version titled The Reckoning, starring Paul Bettany, Brian Cox and Willem Dafoe, but I haven't seen it. Perhaps it would be worth hunting down. (There is a discussion of the film at Arts & Faith that quotes extensively from the book and discusses where the film departs from the novel's action.)