The Devil’s Passion, by award-winning playwright and actor Justin Butcher, tells the greatest story of all, the Passion of Christ told from Satan’s perspective. It offers a radically fresh perspective on the timeless narrative, an audacious hell’s-eye view, by turns comic, gripping, poetic and heart-stirring. Exploring themes of good and evil, religious extremism, freedom, rebellion, life, death, and much more, The Devil’s Passion is both timeless and strikingly modern, an original and riveting production shining a new light on the Easter story.
Framed satirically against a contemporary ‘War on Terror’ backdrop, this 90-minute one-man show tears open key issues of our time: the Annunciation is depicted as the ‘radicalisation’ of a 15-year old schoolgirl, through whom ‘the Enemy enters in’; Satan’s battle is waged in defence of the ‘gates’ of ‘our civilisation’ against the ‘enemies of freedom’; through an Occupied Palestine bristling with checkpoints, walls, razor-wire fences and watchtowers, Jesus heads to Jerusalem on a ‘suicide mission’. Finally discerning Jesus’ plan – to die, to assault the gates of hell itself – Satan enlists the audience to join him in averting disaster. He must do all he can to keep Jesus alive or risk being destroyed.
Part espionage thriller, part satire, part poetic meditation – Homeland meets Mistero Buffo meets Dante’s Inferno – set in a ‘Holy Land’ characterised by harsh divisions, barriers, walls, alienation – between hated Roman occupier and indigenous peoples, between Jew and Samaritan, clean and unclean, slave and free, ‘righteous’ and ‘sinner’, everyone imprisoned tidily in their boxes – a state of affairs which the diabolical narrator finds entirely satisfactory. Until, right from the heart of this suffocating, intractable scenario, the Passion story erupts. A radical, transgressive story of love transcending fear and hatred, of non-violence in the face of oppression, hope breaking down barriers, the victory of vulnerability.