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Monthly arts column

Bunyan revisited

The memory of John Bunyan the Tinker is surrounded by myths, not least the myth of his uniqueness. The old romantic picture of a largely unlearned man, locked in solitary durance vile and managing to produce an imperishable masterpiece of literature, is true only in one respect: The Pilgrim's Progress is indeed a masterpiece.

In fact, Bunyan wrote five great books. Only read the rest of Bunyan's works if you have an urgent interest in the theology or politics of the period. There are gems there, but they generally blush unseen.

Impact

But it is The Pilgrim's Progress that made Bunyan immortal. It was good to be reminded of its qualities in an outstanding radio adaptation by Brian Sibley, a Christian writer and dramatist whose adaptations of Tolkien and Lewis are classics of the genre. Going out on three successive Sundays in January as BBC Radio 4's 'Classic Serial', it featured a galaxy of famous actors and the kind of production technique that succeeds by being unobtrusive. Most of the actors adopted Midlands accents, making the opening minutes homely and comfortable - an illusion soon shattered by the supernatural frights and wonders that beset the pilgrim early on.

The Pilgrim's Progress made a similar impact on the world of the 17th century. The Puritan world was a dangerous one: the living God was active in it, and liable to make his presence known at any time. So Christian left the City of Destruction, with its urban landscape of the known, the familiar and the loved, and set out on a road that took him past mountains that spewed fire and giants that straddled the way. By such means Puritanism became a transforming dynamic in literature. The BBC production mirrored this well; it told the story as Bunyan (beautifully played by Anton Rodgers) told it, dreaming in Bedford prison.

Although the book is recognised as one of the immediate forerunners of the English novel, in Sibley's hands it becomes a very interiorised drama. But this is not at odds with a careful reading of the text, and one of the qualities of the production is that it makes you frequently go back to Bunyan with an enhanced understanding. For example, Neil Dudgeon's well-judged Christian is a performance that emphasises how little Christian initially understood of what was going on around him, and how much of The Pilgrim's Progress consists of explanations.

Ingenious

I hope that Sibley will now dramatise Bunyan's The Holy War, in which the authentic voice and accent of the 17th century still speaks today. But his challenge this time was to make a radio drama out of a book that for centuries was one of three that every literate English family owned (the others were the Authorised Version and The Whole Duty of Man). He has done it very well. He ingeniously solves the problems of conveying long narrative descriptions, interweaves the prison cell with the dream (borrowing for example from Bunyan's 1660 A Relation of my Imprisonment) and catches Bunyan's artless blending of the inflections of everyday speech and the noble cadences of the English Bible (Bunyan, like Matthew Henry, coined many of our modern proverbs and axioms).

The actors served him very well (did ever an unregenerate wife argue so reasonably against her husband seeking salvation as did Sibley's Mrs. Christian?), and the sound effects were superb. Different acoustics were used very skilfully.

Vision

All dramatisations change the original. What matters is whether the adapter successfully communicates the original's spirit and world. Brian Sibley does, brilliantly.

The fact that he is a Christian may well help (though the agnostic Ralph Vaughan Williams, setting The Pilgrim's Progress to music, set the words 'What must I do to be saved?' with immense authenticity). He is also a craftsman and a wordsmith, and that too helps a great deal. But at the heart of Brian Sibley's achievement is Bunyan's original vision. The strength of this dramatisation is that the vision remains more or less intact.

We're fortunate indeed to live in a country where our national broadcasting corporation produces work of such quality and allows the gospel to make its own case. And that's all I'm going to say about Greg Dyke this month.

David Porter