Revisiting Christopher Fry: Sacred temporality on a modern stage

Christopher Fry was instrumental in the early twentieth-century resurgence of plays dealing with religious themes. This movement can at first be seen as anomalous within the era of modernism, when many writers and theorists considered religious sentiment to be a barrier to the more crucial aspects of living authentically within a modern society haunted by history. Nevertheless, Fry's particular appropriation of a sacred conceptualization of time on the modern stage reveals a degree of congruity between him and his contemporaries in their varied attempts to represent transcendent value on the stage without simultaneously removing the audience from their own historical present. In The Boy with a Cart, Fry's superimposition of the life of a tenth-century saint onto modern experience infuses the temporality of the play with transcendent value. Fry shifts his focus to the question of authentic action in A Sleep of Prisoners, and uses a series of biblical dreams to stress the need for a conceptualization of eternity in the passing moment in order for one to act authentically within history.