Coventry is the UK’s City of Culture for 2021. Mark Lawson hears about the drama that will take centre stage

For theatre director Erica Whyman (inset), the breakthrough moment on her latest project came while being shown round the ruins of Coventry’s medieval cathedral by Dean John Witcombe, who is in charge of the modernist replacement built next door.

Whyman recalls that the priest showed her the words which, in 1940, the provost of the church had ordered to be inscribed on what remained of the wall behind the altar after the building had been almost destroyed by a Nazi bombing raid.
“John pointed out,” Whyman recalls, “that the words ‘Father Forgive’ were a very deliberate choice by the city council, the trade unions, and the Church. They decided not to complete the usual phrase: ‘Father Forgive Them’. The point was to suggest that we are all in need of forgiveness. There was a sense of being, as victims of war, compatriots with victims of war all over the world. I was very struck by that story and it set me thinking.”

Whyman, deputy artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, is a member of the committee running Coventry’s tenure as UK City of Culture. Events start in May 2021, and, in September, Whyman will stage a large-scale performance piece called Faith. That moment of seeing the truncated phrase behind the bombed altar made her think of “the subjects of forgiveness and recovery”.