'We began by trying to stage it at a mortuary...'

Michael Morris, February 2002

The founding sacraments of the Christian church looked at from both ends of the telescope. The first piece - The Seven Sacraments of Nicolas Poussin - was close up and personal, performed with great tenderness by Neil Bartlett with the artist Robin Whitmore as a live scribe. The piece was based on the seven Poussin paintings of the sacraments and Neil’s relationship to those. We looked at a number of sites to do with birth and death. We began by trying to stage it in a mortuary…

Eventually we found a featureless lecture theatre in the bowels of the Royal London Hospital. The audience had to walk through the long corridors of a working hospital, dodging stretchers with people being wheeled in and out of rooms we couldn’t see. The Poussin paintings were mostly revealed as details projected on a screen (already there), coincidentally of the same proportion as the seven canvases that hang in the National Gallery of Scotland.

At the end of the monologue the audience was led into another room containing a solitary hospital bed; curtains drawn, the pillow dented by the imprint of a head. You sat there for as long as you wanted, contemplating that final image: Extreme Unction, Poussin’s depiction of which remained propped up like a get well card on the bedside table.

The other end of the telescope came a year later in a greatly expanded work simply entitled Seven Sacraments, each of seven moments in time now forming the basis of a large scale oratorio, rather than a private meditation. An orchestra, several choirs and a group of dancers performed Nicolas Bloomfield’s ambitious score with Bartlett hosting the proceedings in Southwark Cathedral, Southwell Minster in Nottinghamshire and in the upturned ark of St Barnabas in Brighton