Murder At The Cathedral

Ambition and intimacy – the two words that epitomise Tom Littler’s reign at the Orange Tree – are exactly what this magnificent staging of TS Eliot’s 1935 verse drama delivers.

The ambition is obvious from just looking at the programme. Eight years after his last outing in a play, renowned actor David Suchet has been tempted back on stage as Thomas Becket, the Archbishop who proved such a pain in Henry II’s backside that four knights rode all the way to Canterbury to sort him out.

For Littler, this is something of a return too as well as a reflection of how far he has come. For one of his first efforts as director, he went back to Oxford to helm the same play in Christ Church Cathedral, an Oxford Playhouse production that sold out within days and earned high marks from WhatsOnStage’s Simon Tavener. In a neat bit of synchronicity, Tavener directed his own version for Oxford Theatre Guild at the Playhouse this April, six months ahead of Littler’s staging.

The intimacy is stunning clear as soon as you walk in. A raised platform has taken over the centre aisle, which lets the Women of Canterbury (here a community ensemble) and the rest of the company walk right up to the audience. Extra seating at the top of the church puts two sets of benches facing each other mere metres from the altar. If we were any closer, it might not just be the Archbishop worrying about the knights' sharp-looking swords.

Site-specific staging is in this play’s blood. Eliot wrote it for the 1935 Canterbury Festival, and it premiered in the Chapter House of Canterbury Cathedral, a short walk from the spot where Becket was cut down in 1170. Ninety-one years on from that debut, the Orange Tree has decamped across Kew Road to St John the Divine while its own building is redeveloped. Necessity, in other words, has turned into a homecoming. The story is lean: Becket returns from exile, sees off four Tempters, preaches on Christmas morning and meets four Knights who then turn to the audience to justify themselves with the smoothness of a press office in damage-control mode.

Suchet is the fulcrum. A man who once recorded the entire Bible single-handed was never going to be cowed by a few hundred lines of Eliot, and his Becket is a thoughtful soul who sees his situation with clarity and courage. He keeps a natural cadence throughout, giving the verse just the right touch of feeling whether he is working his way through the Tempters, confiding in his priests, calmly delivering the Christmas sermon or furiously decrying the Knights. There is no showboating and no grandstanding Poirot twinkle, just a mind making itself up in front of us.

He is, though, almost upstaged by a sparky Jyuddah Jaymes as the First Knight. Jaymes performed in Coney’s 2024 immersive game-theatre show 1884 at Shoreditch Town Hall, and he is clearly at home this close to the pews. He adds pace and brash delivery in contrast to Suchet’s more studied approach (the thug as crowd-pleaser, which is rather the point). Poirot devotees should also note a neat casting in-joke: David Yelland, who for seven years played the detective’s valet George, turns up here as the Fourth Tempter and the Fourth Knight. The butler, it turns out, did do it.

More than anything, it is the staging that persuades. Between Littler’s direction, the unmistakable smell of incense, Peter Mumford’s crepuscular lighting and the weight of history wherever you look, it is almost impossible not to feel transported closer to the time and place of this story. Rob Jones’s platform turns the nave into a processional route, so the chorus’s dread arrives at eye level rather than from a distant stage. Orlando Gough’s score and the community chorus add layer upon layer of sublime atmosphere.

The only catch is getting in. Richmond is sold out, so the realistic options are the Orange Tree’s Friday Rush releases or a trip west when the production moves to the Theatre Royal Bath. That transfer is the real test: a proscenium house with no incense, no nave and no altar a few metres away. Much of this production’s power is borrowed from the building, and Bath audiences may notice its absence.

The Old Vic has turned Matthew Warchus’s similarly immersive A Christmas Carol into an annual fixture, and the Orange Tree should think about doing the same with this. Not at Christmas, mind. Becket may have died on 29 December, but no vicar in his right mind wants to heat a nave in midwinter at current prices. October, when audiences come drifting back to the theatre after the summer, would suit it nicely. Let Scrooge keep December. Becket can have the clocks going back.

Murder in the Cathedral continues at St John the Divine, Richmond until 7 November, then plays Theatre Royal Bath from 10 to 21 November.


Photo credit: Marc Brenner