God's spell

As it is Sunday and my theme today is a religious one, I wanted to create an image with a religious theme. Taking an image of a cupboard with the two doors slightly open, I then put it into Photostudio and played around with it.

Using lots of motion blur and emboss effects I came up with this one. Not a great image, certainly not Exhibition standard, but it suits my purpose.

In the 1970's I interviewed David Essex, who at that time was appearing in the London production of the ground-breaking musical "Godspell."

Reaction to the show had been strong, and I asked David to tell me about this controversial role.

"The nicest thing is that the original cast have always believed in the show from the beginning," he said. "It is nice to get the reaction for something that we deeply feel about. It has been adopted by the people, which is like having your own show become a success, and it really does belong to the cast themselves."

"The initial concept of the thing was scary, especially when it was announced that the show was coming over, and we were going to do it with a clown with a red nose and all that going on."

"People got a bit paranoid about that, and they wrote letters in and said things like we were going to burn in hell and all that. However, afterwards they are now seeing the sense in why we did it."

"We play Jesus as a clown because there are a lot of parallels - clowns are often the victim, but never completely defeated. I think Jesus was that, and a clown is also very vulnerable with a lot of irony and pathos, and I think Jesus had a lot of those qualities as well. It just feels right doing it this way."

Of course, times have changed and I doubt if the show today would raise any eyebrows, but in those days it was productions like this that were at the forefront of innovation, and are part of our theatrical heritage.