Pilate’s Dilemma
HE BBC adaptation of Dixon and. Morrah’s Caesar's Friend (1YC) is, dramatically, the best Good Friday play I have heard since the relevant episode of Dorothy Sayers’s The Man Born To Be King. Curiously enough, although, so far as memory serves, Caesar’s Friend antedates the Sayers play by several years, there is much in it which recalls. her much-discussed treatment of Biblical
material. The easy | colloquial language, which gave added point to rather than detracted from the power of the story, the. analysis of! Judas’s motives, the weight given to the politics of Jesus’s condemnation, the
piercing through the accepted stereotypes of Pilate and Caiaphas to the human qualities of each-all this strongly reminded me of the justly-cele-brated cycle. There is, of course, a difference in emphasis; in Caesar’s Friend, despite the reverent treatment of the religious implications, we are left thinking of Pilate’s cruel dilemma, with sympathy for him, rather than of the larger meaning of the Crucifixion. Michael Hordern as Pilate and Ralph Truman as Caiaphas gave resounding performances; I enjoyed especially Caiaphas’s nice line in irony. And this Pilate was both more probable and more complex than Anatole France’s forgetful Procurator. \ ; i
J.C.
R.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19520502.2.21.9
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 669, 2 May 1952, Page 11
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199Pilate’s Dilemma New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 669, 2 May 1952, Page 11
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