From AwardAnnals
| Book: | Morality Play |
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| Author: | Barry Unsworth |
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| Publisher: | Bantam Dell Pub Group |
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Nicholas Barber is a twenty-three-year-old priest who, fearing the wrath of the bishop for breaking his vows of chastity, takes up with a troupe of traveling players. Coming to a small town in the middle of winter, the troupe puts on their usual morality play but gets caught up in a drama of a different kind: a murder has taken place, and a mute-and-deaf girl stands condemned, awaiting execution. Seeing an opportunity to attract a larger audience than ever, the players go through the town collecting information about the murder, which they weave into their next performance. As they perform, the story takes on a life of its own. Soon they learn that their drama is far closer to the dangerous truth than they originally imagined - and they are summoned to perform for the local potentate, the powerful Lord de Guise, who has his own reasons to be interested in their version of events. Bringing fourteenth-century England to vibrant life, Barry Unsworth deftly shows us a time that is far off yet strangely familiar, where underneath medieval trappings lie the same corruption and moral dilemmas we face today.
Related works
The Reckoning
Paul McGuigan
Willem Dafoe (
Shadow of the Vampire) and Paul Bettany (
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World) deliver powerful performances in this riveting story of temptation, murder and redemption.
Against the turbulent backdrop of England during the Middle Ages, a priest (Bettany), on the run from his disgraceful past, encounters a ragtag band of traveling actors who are searching for their next performance. Soon after arriving at an unknown villiage, the troupe discovers that a mute woman has been sentenced to death for the murder of a local boy. To seek out the truth, the leader of the actors (Dafoe) decides to break tradition of performing biblical plays and stages a performance based on the alleged facts of the crime.
Suddenly, the stage becomes the setting for solving a spellbinding murder-mystery…one that will reveal the power of art, the temptation of evil and the ultimate cost of justice.
