Theatre: Globe branches out

It's not just all-male Cleopatras at Shakespeare's reconstructed theatre. They've even made room for a new work

POOR WILL, inky-fingered and desperate for an idea in the opening scenes of Shakespeare in Love, is probably no more than a witty figment of Tom Stoppard's imagination. But it would be understandable if he had struggled to produce plays to order. The playhouse for which he was scribbling in 1593 was the Rose, but the Globe, built in 1599, made similar demands: a space that required a strong, possibly epic, narrative, with not much to help in the way of effects; a stage that put the actors in close proximity to their audience and an audience that included all levels of society, from the poor and illiterate groundling to the classically-educated aristocrat.

Now, 400 years after the Lord Chamberlain's Men launched the first new play there, (possibly Julius Caesar), a 20th-century playwright has accepted the challenge to meet very similar demands at the reconstructed Globe. Peter Oswald, an Oxford graduate in his early thirties, is, of course, quick to avoid direct comparison with Shakespeare, but Augustine's Oak bears striking parallels in conception to the plays of his predecessor.

"I was writing for the Globe in the present moment and, like most writers, I shy away from taking Shakespeare as a model, but I like to think I came to similar conclusions when faced with that space." Aware that there was "so much ground to break", he put himself at the disposal of the Globe and obligingly went through seven or eight drafts, working closely with his director, Tim Carroll.

Oswald naturally chooses heightened language, often verse, as his medium. (His Fair Ladies at a Game of Poem Cards was presented at the National in 1996 and he has translated Racine's Phedre and Schiller's Don Carlos.) Like the author of Julius Caesar and Henry V, who drew on historical sources - Plutarch and the Chronicles of Holinshed and Edward Hall in those cases - he has turned to an earlier text, Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. An epic subject - St Augustine's mission to convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity in 597 and the conflicts between the Romanised Christians and the older Celtic ones, and between pagans and converts - allowing for plenty of action,including fights and visions, as well as more intimate interaction between characters.

Oswald has kept fairly closely to his source, but, like Shakespeare, he has invented storylines and introduced a "clown". Lilla is a historical character, but Oswald transforms him into someone whose earthy or satirical responses relieve the seriousness of debate. The plot involves three main groups: the visitors from Rome led by Augustine, who clearly feel they are on the outskirts of civilisation; the Saxons, especially King Ethelbert, his wife Bertha, and their daughter, Tata, and the Welsh Christians with their echoes of Druidism.

A play mainly in verse with a Christian theme might seem, in 1999, despite its millennial timeliness, so brave an experiment as to be foolhardy, but this is no tract and the language is never inaccessible. Anglo-Saxon is rendered in conversational prose, Latin in verse, with the Welsh bishops employing a language, in Oswald's words, "wilder and more mythological while the Romans are more urbanised and don't rant about dragons and poison".

The oak of the title is a meeting place where Augustine holds a synod with the Celts to discuss their outdated practices and persuade them into the Roman fold. The pagan Ethelbert and his Christian wife are deeply divided by their religious differences. Rather than Bede's assumption that Tata is a Christian from birth, Oswald suggests that she is so distressed by the way religion affects her parents' marriage that she resists conversion.

Although he is a practising Christian himself, Oswald is all too aware of the negative part religion sometimes plays. "There is a destructive side to human nature which uses religion for its own ends. When I was writing, I felt that the argument was a bit like Unionists and Republicans viewed through the screen of history."

Whether or not he welcomes the comparison, this viewpoint clearly aligns him with Shakespeare. After all, with Henry V this "wooden O" became "a national place, a natural forum" for a debate about nationhood.

`Augustine's Oak', Globe, London SE1 (0171-401 9919) in rep.

The author is arts editor of `The Times Educational Supplement'