Written on the heart

After almost a century of unrest, the King James Bible was intended to end the violent upheavals of the English Reformation. But deep-seated discord forces a leading translator to confront the betrayal of his youthful religious ideals for the sake of social peace. The play begins with a heated debate about last-minute revisions to the new version, taking place in the Holborn house of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes in 1610. It then backtracks first to Flanders in 1536 to show us the outlawed William Tyndale smuggling his biblical translation out of prison, and then to Yorkshire in 1586 to demonstrate the unresolved tensions inside the Protestant Reformation. At the heart of the play is a long scene in which Andrewes debates at length with the ghost of Tyndale, who had been burnt at the stake almost 70 years earlier.