Holy Warriors

Globe Theatre, London SE1

3/5

DAVID Eldridge’s “fantasia” using the 12th-century third crusade as a catalyst to focus on “the history of violent struggle in the Holy Lands” comes at a moment when the tragic barbarity of the Middle Ages is grotesquely surpassed daily not by flashing scimitars but by deadly drones.

The crusades, like Western-supported Israeli expansionism, were largely fuelled by rapacity coloured by savage religious fervour.  

This is a courageous project since Eldridge admits there will necessarily be echoes of the Globe’s house dramatist. 

He has moreover to convey at least an outline of complex historical events and their actors to audiences whose school history lessons left many none the wiser.

This two-hour epic attempts to cope with these difficulties by using a dramatic comic-strip treatment. 

The first half deals with the Boys Own Paper confrontation between Alexander Sidig’s charismatic strategist Saladin and John Hopkins’s bully-boy Richard the Lionheart. Director James Dacre laces the derring-do with humour as when the news of the fall of Jerusalem to “the son of Satan,” delivered with the cursory speed of a series of tweets, causes the geriatric pope to drop dead. 

The second half has the deceased Richard now in purgatory watching a hopscotch tour through the succeeding history of the Middle East. 

Just in case the accelerated action involving a host of historical power players intent on controlling the area, including Napoleon, Lawrence of Arabia, Golda Meir, Ben Gurion, Menachem Begin, Anwar Sadat, US president Jimmy Carter and finally a buffoon-like Tony Blair leaves the audience at sea.

Richard’s mother, Geraldine Alexander’s dominating Eleanor of Aquitaine, then recounts the events again. 

Eldridge disavows any intention to influence his audience but inevitably Richard’s final refusal to contemplate having acted differently and a living comic cut-out George W Bush assuring him that “This crusade… is gonna take a while,” underlines a view that the Western power-mongers will never accept Saladin’s demand that they “should stop interfering in our lands,” adding “Would that we could learn from history. Perhaps that is for the people.” 

Plays until August 24. Box office (020) 7401-9919)

Gordon Parsons