In Extremis tells the story of Abelard and Heloise, one of the great love stories in history, preserved in letters between them of bewitching beauty and searing philosophical insight. Heloise was one of the most famous women of her age, renowned for her extraordinary learning, and later to become the first great woman of Western Literature. Abelard was a Canon of Notredame and the founder of Scholasticism, a philosophical movement which changed the Catholic Church for ever and whose most famous adherent was Thomas Aquinas. Their love story was caught in the centre of the world, the eye of a hurricane of change when the Vatican was at last insisting on chastity from its priests, when a battle was raging between the spiritual and the intellectual within the church; it involves worldly power, eternal damnation, illegitimate birth, the blood feud and castration. Abelard's. It is a shame then that Brenton treats this extraordinary tale in such clumsy a manner. It would have been better to have left it well alone.
      The play opens with an outline of Plato's theory of the forms, the idea that there is a perfect corollary for all that is on earth in some imagined - or heavenly realm. This is pedantically plodded through ... 'imagine a table' etc... as though to an audience of A' level students. Then we meet our hero, the outspoken good looking young Abelard who winningly refutes the Platonic status quo with his Aristotelian dialectic and outrages and dumfounds his plodding Master. "Not again Abelard!...To question the universals is to question the trinity itself!". The hero is smothered with praise from his new fans whilst the dotard slumps exhausted in a corner, 'Oh Abelard, you're brilliant! Let's set up a school!" Abelard was not young when the affair with Heloise started, he was 40and already a considerable power in the Church and known to the King, hehad no need to run off and set up a school. He was not gorgeous either. The name he chose for himself; 'Abelard', is thought to derive for 'tub of lard', and though clearly possessed of a voracious sexual appetite he made jokes about his considerable 'substance'. This is a pantomime rendering of a subtle and complicated story, and whilst a robust treatment of Shakespeare works extremely well in The Globe seeing this play in this setting begs a comparison which can only be to Brenton's infinite detriment. When we get to Bernard of Clairveaux's monastery where monks are fainting flat on their faces from fasting and Bernard starts to lick the soles travellers feet ('look - he's a saint!'), we know that the Monty Python effect has truly set in. It doesn't get any better. Oh yes it does. OH NO - it really doesn't!
      Oliver Boot as Abelard and Sally Brenton as Heloise give adequate performances given the material they are required to work with, and though the wink-wink nudge-nudge of the direction is wearing 'in extremis', they do manage to effortlessly remember their lines. Something that seems more of a strain for some of the supporting cast. Somewhat incongruously, the music for the production was very good, composed by the period music specialist William Lyons and performed by lyre, lute and wooded flute. But alas the play has very little to recommend it. Early on in the proceedings, in a rare attempt at dramatic irony Heloise's uncle Canon Fulbert, shouts 'Testicles!'. I could not put it better myself.
Charlie Taylor