'Feeling freer and fiercer and more queer than I ever have (on stage) in my life'

Neil Bartlett, 2002

from The Seven Sacraments of Nicolas Poussin

Nicolas Poussin's great series of paintings known as The Seven Sacraments hangs in a small, dark, marble-floored room in the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh. In the summer of 1994 I noted in my diary that I had visited this room every year for the past fifteen years of my life, and had cried each time. I realised as I wrote that these paintings were going to be the material of my next piece of work.

A year later, looking for a possible site for the piece, Michael Morris took me to the Edinburgh City Morgue – he pretended that we were reconnoitring a location for a film. In the Chapel of Rest, I noticed that the pane of glass through which relatives are invited to view the corpse was of exactly the same dimensions as one of Poussin's canvasses. Around this one detail the text for the performance began to cohere. Michael first heard it, in private, in a hesitant voice, in a room over a church hall in Brighton.

It was first given in public in 1997 in a lecture theatre hidden in the bowels of the Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel. There, I remember the sight and sound of people in the audience crying quietly. I remember my father coming to see the piece, and not speaking to me, just touching me gently on the shoulder. I remember a passage where I spoke in character as Mary Magdalen, naked except for underpants beneath a backless surgical gown, feeling freer and fiercer and more queer than I ever have (on stage) in my life.

In late May of 1998 I performed the piece for the last time, this time in Southwark Cathedral, accompanied by an orchestra and a choir and sixty schoolchildren and an audience that filled the nave and both transepts. I wore my best suit and carried a prayerbook. As I spoke the last words (stolen from John Donne), I lifted my face up into the great golden vault of the crossing, and then down to look at the three nine-year-old boys who were sitting at my feet, and I felt astonished at what we had done, and done in those particular spaces.

There were several moments over those three years of work which were genuinely extraordinary, of real worth; I would like to thank Artangel for their part in bringing together the extraordinary teams of artists, technicians and producers who made them happen. And for never asking me why I was doing what I was doing.