Roll up, roll up. Come and be entertained and open your mind to a world of illuminated reason and humanist enlightenment. But beware the perils of becoming a spokesman for the awkward squad. 

Such became the fate of 20-year old Edinburgh medical student Thomas Aikenhead in 1696 and it eventually cost him his life. 

Indeed, he was the last man in these isles to be hanged for blasphemy. 

His crime?  To speak his mind, as any undergraduate might, in the company of friends Mungo and Frazer. However, having denounced the entrenched dogmas of the established Church in the same spirit of Galileo and Giordano Bruno, he refused to retract. 

The established Church’s solution was to punish him in a way to quell any future repetitions and so, with the connivance of the Lord Advocate, he became a scapegoat and was dead just six weeks later. 


You may have thought that developing this tale of personal tragedy into an anarchic musical would be beyond the combined talents of its assorted ensemble. Far from it. 

On one hand, we have the director, Paul Hunter working with celebrated poet and lyricist Simon Armitage [following his success of The Odyssey at the Everyman] to produce an evening of mesmerising gallows humour interspersed with memorable stage dynamics and rich, vocally harmonic songs including the raucous opening number “Thomas Aikenhead – Who The F*ck Is He?”.  From the outset you know that you’re in for a night to remember.

Credit must be given to the highly inventive Iain Johnstone for composing the quality music for this show and, also, Laura Hopkins for innovative stage designs which became part of well-choreographed scene changes.  

It’s a heady mix based on the premise that, quoting Aikenhead himself, “Religion is an illusion – a rhapsody of feigned and ill-invented nonsense”.  

Interesting to note that each member of the cast took on the role of Thomas in various scenarios during the performance and there were many instances of surreal, comic interchanges worthy of Brechtian theatre of the absurd and, more specifically, stagecraft which would have been given a nod of approval from the great Ken Campbell himself. 

However, inclusion of the Match of the Day pundit parodies on the fate of young Thomas didn’t add to the proceedings, neither did the African-inspired solo arrangements.

 


There’s a variety of contemporary references such as Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Sex Pistols Never Mind The Bollocks, final cast T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Je Suis Thomas” and a deliberate skit of the arrival of the Three Magi which we can all relate to. 

So, it took the kind of risks which the Playhouse wouldn’t normally go anywhere near. Good on them for it’s bursting with what the Scots call “thrawn” – an absolute conviction in their own self-confidence. Much like what Aikenhead himself espoused. For, even on the day of his execution, he wrote that “It is a principal innate and co-natural to every man to have an insatiable inclination to the truth and to seek for it as for hid treasure”. 

That same desire for an inherent truth, and indeed for an overdue acknowledgement of Aikenhead’s unbowed testament in the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment, became telescopically refracted to reveal that logical reason should be the ultimate explanation for our human existence and that space is a country of infinite dreams. There’s no Heaven, just the skies of the universe to let you enter your mind. 

Now, where have we heard that before?

8/10

*Until Saturday February 27.