FringeReview UK 2026

Murder in the Cathedral

Orange Tree Theatre, a co-production with St John the Divine

Genre: Biographical Drama, classical, Drama, Historical, Mainstream Theatre, Political, Theatre, Tragedy

Venue: St John the Divine, for Orange Tree, Richmond

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

It might be good to time-travel to that site-specific, ascetic premiere of T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. Staged at Canterbury Cathedral in 1935, it seems to have been pretty solemn. Yet a sacred play with a sassy Agatha Christie-like title neatly sums up Eliot’s juggling. There’s both 20^th century Shavian antagonists (with the Tempers and Knights) versus Aeschylus-inspired verse with a Gilbert Murray accent; and a pinch of Everyman. There has to be balance and that can be perilous. This Orange Tree revival of Murder in the Cathedral manages the sacred intersected by the spectacular with aplomb. Premiering at Richmond’s St John the Divine Church, directed by Tom Littler and Francesca Ellis, with David Suchet as Thomas Becket till November 7, it then transfers to Bath. Running now at two hours 40, it might shorten during the run.

Whilst some productions might emphasise the ascetic, Littler and Ellis have worked within the magnificence of St John’s interior. Anything less would be dwarfed. This production’s memorably energised: first by the Orange Tree’s community ensemble. Sixteen Women of Canterbury are directed by Ellis, and led by the quartet of Sally Cheng, Rebecca Thorn, Mila Carter and Chyna-Rose Frederick. They reflect the original four-strong ensemble, here quadrupled. In loose stone or dove-grey dresses (modelled on Greek tragedy revivals), white-daubed faces and bare feet they run up the nave, or dissolve into the chancel. Their power here is amplified too. At points along the nave, individual voices (as Eliot explicitly directed late in life) rivet their choric forebodings as part of the ritual theatre this is.

Eliot’s verse here is infused by those mannered Murray-phrased Greek translations, and doesn’t always escape that epoch. This production references all that to allow us an in, invoking the 1930s more than 1170. Lizzie Kew Ross’s movement direction is nowhere more impressive than here. Orlando Gough’s music – faintly recalling that in 1170 Hildegard of Bingen was still composing – features a huge bass drum struck by the Women; or once a Tempter or others. Most of all though Gough’s striking choral settings sung by the Chorus with musical direction by Michael Waldron, reminds us of contemporary church composers like Cecilia McDowall, rather than the spikier James Macmillan, let alone more modernist composers. Max Pappenheim’s sound renders everything clear in such a space.

Rob Jones’s set – essentially a marbled nave floor – working with the church interior spectacularly and variously lit by Peter Mumford, is a festal triumph. Stained-glass windows and gilt bounce back some of the more vanilla lighting. But there’s far more.  Against a blaze of candles in the chancel or held by the chorus, a rectangle of light flares at the chancel’s entrance. Mumford crafts a door into the dark where figures vanish as if into a portal. Elsewhere it’s spectral blue for the chorus, ghosting light laterally across them and down the nave; spotlit and slant for Suchet’s Archbishop, glaring for tempters and often sacral for priests; and blood-red at ritual danger and slaughter. Cat Fuller’s costumes vary, referencing 1930s clothing and even its period Greek tragedy revivals (in the chorus). There’s the splendid. Suchet’s red and gilt-white, with transformations: the priests move from black to red, white and purple. And the grey-clad, then black-leather clad Tempter/Knights ground character in dark hues; like gangland or even Blackshirt hoods.

Suchet seems to engrave the walls with his voice, ringing out like Roman bronze. He never has to raise it either; and sometimes glints with surprising humour. When Suchet bends down to bless one of the Women with “human kind cannot bear very much reality” he does it almost as an aside. Yet it’s crystalline, ready for the Four Quartets that followed. Suchet, relishing his restraint, somehow absorbs an energy back from the church as he dispenses authority to his subordinates, seraphically reassures the Women of Canterbury, preaches to all with a Donnean certainty (probably more gently) as an archbishop; and adamantine in his varying responses to the Tempters, and their Knight avatars later on.

Here, varying pitch with different facets of his past or himself, Becket’s at his most human: here too he has to wrestle with his earlier and present self. Paradoxically, it’s Suchet and Becket at their most relatable, exposed, challenged. When David Yelland’s Fourth Tempter turned Fourth Knight reflects that Becket not only refused to escape, but ordered the doors to be unbarred, it’s difficult not to agree with him that Becket was indeed tempted (as Yelland earlier exhorted) to “Fare forward to the end”; embrace martyrdom as an adjunct of his becoming “a monster of egotism”. Becket and his scribe Eliot expend fistfuls of fine hairs on denying this. That’s different to “For good or ill, let the wheel turn” which Suchet delivers with hieratic gravitas.  And yet… Perhaps a leap of faith is needed. E. M. Forster famously excoriated Eliot in 1929: “If it (religious feeling) exists, then… He has not got it. What he has seen is something terrible… and declines to say so plainly.” That’s harsh. But a gift of this 1930s-inflected production is to take us back to 1930s arguments.

An alert and limber Jyuddah Jaymes (First Tempter, First Knight), takes a mic when addressing the audience and MCing his colleagues. There’s the political operator marking the Second Tempter, played with withering savviness by Ben Caplan (also Second Knight). Nick Sampson’s aggrieved squirearchy as Third Tempter and Third Knight furnishes a baffled contrast. Finally as dangerous Fourth Tempter (as well as Fourth Knight), Yelland memorably dons both bishop’s robes and, as Marvell once termed “a bishop’s cruelty”, turns religious Machiavel.

They’re flanked and opposed by Michael Lyle’s youthful, anxious First Priest, Paul Hickey’s substantial and elevated Second Priest (exuding an authority second only to Suchet), and Mensah Bediako’s vocally rich Third Priest. Jad Sayegh glows briefly in the chipper, flat-capped role of Messenger, like a Thirties tout.

Becket’s successor Rowan Williams contextualises the 1930s atmosphere in his programme essay: where German and other priests were hounded for standing up to fascism, and by implication those like Popes Pius XI and XII who were complicit. I don’t think that’s a true correlation of Becket/Henry II, even if Eliot strips out the political agon that Shakespeare might have relished, scrolling back to Greek essentials. But Williams cannily suggests Eliot’s inner confusions and conflicts, still fresh, inform his Becket. He suggests the 2020s too marks an age of anxiety: specifically, about tyrants and dictators. Having known the play since my teens but never seen it, I still can’t imagine it bettered in a climate that needs it. This, with Suchet’s almost convincing me of Becket’s not exactly seeking martyrdom, might prove the defining production for a generation.

Chorus (Bath) Rebecca Askew, Florence Dobson, Samantha Dorsey, Beatrice John, Yuki Sutton, Hannah Whitehouse, Sonya Cullingford.

Casting Director Matilda James CDG, Fight Director Philip d’Orleans, Assistant Director Freya Griffiths, Associate Set Designer Ethan Creek, Associate Costume Designer Zoe Thomas-Webb, Casting Assistant Emily Chase, Design Assistant Mio Jue,

Wardrobe  Supervisor Amber Layton, Sound Number One Phil Michael, Sound Number Two Daisy Taylor.

Production Manager Jack Boissieux, Company Stage Manager Cheryl Firth, DSM Lisa Cochrane, ASMs Claire Hill, Charlotte Smith-Barker, stage Management Student Placement Kerstyn Johnson

Production & Technical Director Phil Bell, OT CSM Jade Gooch, Production Technician Priya Virdee. Photo Credit: Marc Brenner.

Published October 20, 2026October 22, 2026 by Simon Jenner