Sixty years on, Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons is one of the most enduring dramas of conscience that feature a religious figure as the central character, writes Mark Lawson

On 1 July 1960, the Globe Theatre on London’s Shaftesbury Avenue opened a new play. Most reviewers admired the main performance, by Paul Scofield, but were less convinced by the subject matter: the build-up to Thomas More’s execution for refusing to sign an oath of allegiance to King Henry VIII repudiating the authority over England of the Pope.

Sixty years on, however, Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons contests only with George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan (1923) for the title of the most durable twentieth-century play about a religious figure. It is still regularly revived – most recently by Martin Shaw in London and Frank Langella in New York – and the 1966 movie of A Man for All Seasons won six Oscars, including Best Picture and, for Scofield, Best Actor. Counterintuitively for a director who was Jewish, Fred Zinnemann achieved a significant double-bill of Catholic movies, having previously made A Nun’s Story (1959), with Audrey Hepburn.

Whereas successful stage plays are often subsequently seen on TV or heard on radio, A Man for All Seasons reversed the sequence. It was first broadcast on the BBC Home Service (the grandmother of Radio 4) on 26 July 1954, as part of the speech between that season’s Proms. Reflecting the regular religious content of schedules at the time, the play was followed by a 15-minute slot called Lighten Our Darkness: Evening Prayers.