Christian theatre is a gift

This week, Ten Ten Theatre enjoyed a run on a West End stage. The run was only for a week, but it afforded the audience a taste of what this highly professional and original Catholic theatre company can do.

The production was Kolbe's Gift. The play tells the true story of how a Franciscan priest, Maximillian Kolbe, volunteered to take the place of a prisoner sentenced to death in Auschwitz.

But the play also relates what happened to the prisoner he saved, Franciszek Gajowniczek. For the rest of his life Franciszek pondered why he had survived the war and how he should respond to the 'gift' Kolbe had given him. In fact, in some ways, Kolbe's heroic sacrifice proved a burden. Franciszek lost both his sons in a Russian bomb attack in Poland and after the war endured the tyranny of communist rule. He wondered whether he should have done something more with his life after the war rather than taking a quiet town hall job. He accepted all invitations to talk about Kolbe and on occasion faced false allegations that he had begged to be spared when sentenced to death at Auschwitz. He also defended Kolbe against the smear of anti-Semitism.

Kolbe's Gift is imaginatively staged and impeccably performed. It is by no means an exclusively 'Catholic' play. Maximillian Kolbe is a saintly figure but Franciszek's reflections are universal ones about love, suffering, sacrifice and salvation.

Ten Ten spends most of its time touring schools, prisons and parishes with plays and workshops. Their work has provoked discussions on such issues as pornography, the influence of the internet, knife crime, sex and marriage, abortion and parenthood.

This kind of creative activity can reach the otherwise unreachable. The proof is the positive responses to initiatives such as a Lent drama project at Feltham Young Offenders' Institution where inmates explored the Easter story through drama, dance and music.

Last November Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster wrote to Ten Ten asking whether they could develop a drama that explores human-trafficking. The result is a one-woman show about a victim of trafficking from Eastern Europe that is being prepared for a national tour in 2014.

Then there is Kolbe's Gift. The run at the 400-seater Leicester Square Theatre was a sell-out. This was achieved using the company's links with schools with children bringing fliers home to their families. But volunteers also spread the word by speaking after weekend Masses in London churches and beyond. Ten Ten's founder, Martin O'Brien, tells me he'd love to take Kolbe's Gift around the country. For that to happen the word has to be spread even wider.

Elena Curti is The Tablet's Deputy Editor