Man of the moment

The playwright Jonathan Moore’s very contemporary reimagining of the founder of the Jesuits

It is possibly unusual to compare St Ignatius of Loyola’s selection of the first Jesuits to “putting a great band together, like the Sex Pistols or the Clash”. But then Jonathan Moore has never been drawn to the usual.

After emerging in the 1980s as an actor (Mr Guppy in the BBC’s Bleak House) and a “punk playwright”, with dark and dangerous dramas such as Treatment, he burst into the opera world with a production of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Greek which, like all his work, challenged conventions.

Some of Moore’s former colleagues and audiences might be surprised to find him now writing and directing a play about a saint. But, Moore, raised in an Irish Catholic family in south London, remains a churchgoer – often attending, in London, the Jesuit church at Farm Street – and believes that the man from Loyola, the protagonist in his play Inigo, is not dissimilar to the edgy modern rebels that he has previously written about and portrayed.

St Ignatius, Moore says, “seemed to me to be a rather counter-cultural, radical character, both in terms of his desire to change the world and also to change certain conservative aspects of the Church”.

During our conversation in a rehearsal room above a pub, he refers to the Jesuits familiarly as “the Js” and acknowledges: “I’ve always been interested in the Jesuits and in Ignatian spirituality.” Interest in the production has been increased by the fact the Catholic Church is currently being run by a particularly famous member of the Society of Jesus.

Secular theatregoers and critics may think that Moore has tweaked the facts to emphasise the connection between Pope Francis and the founder of his order. One of the title character’s speeches in Inigo – in which he urges the Church to get rid of its snobbery, bureaucracy and riches – is startlingly reminiscent of some recent papal rhetoric.

But this is not topical spin: “This play was written in the time of Pope Benedict; but you’re right that it does now, through some curious process of osmosis and sea-change, feel very current. This is an Ignatius who goes to Rome and takes on the Establishment, saying that things have to change.”

Moore suspects that “posh theatres” declined the play because it was too positive about religion. Crucially, though, his Ignatius is no simpering mystic. Until reading the play, I had not realised that the first Jesuit, like St  Paul, was what the tabloid press calls a reformed bad boy, with a past as a street fighter and philanderer. His confession before his conversion is reputed to have taken three days. “I’m very keen to stress that,” Moore says. “Because the thing about Ignatius now is that he’s behind this carapace of candle wax. I’m sort of disturbed that I admire Ignatius so much and so I’ve worked very hard to make the play not hagiographic. I want to make him a flawed, difficult person.

“The American Jesuit James Martin, who was very encouraging about this play, wrote a book about saints and they were some very flawed people. Ignatius, even after his conversion, is basically the same person. One of the things I want to get across is that conversion isn’t about floating away on a cloud but redirecting your personality in a better direction. Those very things you think of as your flaws are what make you what you are.”

After converting, Ignatius walked 400 miles from Loyola to Manresa and one reason that the writer, at 51, looks impressively fit is that he recently completed this pilgrimage (the “Camino Ignaciano”) as part of his research.

The Ignatian way, the playwright points out, also offers a workout for the mind: “The Jesuits are seen as the great intellectuals of Catholicism and that is demonstrably the case. But emotion was also fundamental. Psychotherapy, the 12-Step programme, mindfulness – these all come directly from Ignatian spirituality: that idea of being in the moment.”

The term “in the moment” is also used in drama schools and rehearsal rooms to encourage actors to play each scene as if they do not know what happens next in the play. And, reading Inigo, I was struck by the theatricality of the Ignatian spiritual exercises, which encourage subjects to place themselves within a scriptural scene, like an actor.

“Absolutely. When I went to my first Jesuit spiritual retreat in north Wales, in the mid-1980s, it was just an attempt to avoid having a materialistic Christmas in London. And I was doing the Spiritual Exercises, especially the imaginative contemplations, and I was having so much fun that I was convinced I must be doing it wrong. I thought prayer was supposed to be boring. And the spiritual director said: no, this is how it is.

“You’re right: it actually was like being in a rehearsal room. [The Russian theatre theorist] Stanislavski called it sense-memory, going back to your feelings at that time. Ignatius, in his letters, writes: ‘May we feel the spirit of God.’ The connection is emotional, as an artist’s connection to their work is.”

I have been following Moore’s work since seeing Treatment almost 30 years ago and he has an impressively eclectic set of supporters. One recent production had sitting in a row the rapper Tinie Tempah, the American author and broadcaster Bonnie Greer and a Jesuit priest, leading a theatre director to tell Moore: “Only you could pull off a combo like that.”

For logistical and security reasons, it is unlikely that Pope Francis will turn up to see Inigo but, if he did, he would certainly recognise in it both the saint and himself.