Michael Billington recalls that he was “bowled over” by the performance of St Mark’s Gospel given in 1978 by Alec McCowen. So too were very many of us, including a group of Anglican worshippers from deepest rural Oxfordshire who saw McCowen at the Mermaid theatre, in London, that year.
What made the performance particularly remarkable was the religious context of the period. Biblical criticism had recently taught us – not least via the Anglican theologian Dennis Nineham’s groundbreaking Penguin commentary on St Mark – that the gospel was a kind of potpourri, an assemblage of originally separate and unconnected sections that had left the text fragmented for us into mere bits and pieces.
At the same time, the New English Bible had unleashed its particular version of translational accuracy and verbal dullness on church congregations and the beauties of the King James authorised version were being forgotten.
In his utterly enthralling rendition of St Mark, McCowen managed in one evening both to restore a sense of the power, unity and driving narrative force of the gospel, and to remind us of the sheer glory and immediacy and the sharp comprehensibility of the old translation. It was both a cultural, religious and dramatic tour de force.