Press coverage

Evening Standard, 28 May 1998

The Times, 18 May 1998:
"Nobody watching the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, will doubt that a great religious ceremony still carries profound emotional force. That, however, was a unique national occasion. Can the ancient liturgies and majestic language of the Book of Common Prayer still play any part in ordinary, private lives in the late 20th century?
The Anglican Church itself sometimes seems dubious. But Seven Sacraments - a new oratorio by the writer and actor Neil Bartlett, composer Nicolas Bloomfield and choreographer Leah Hausman makes touching, wry and intriguing drama out of that awkward junction between centuries-old Christian ritual and modem scepticism." (Richard Morrison)

The Independent on Sunday, 17 May 1998:
"Originally an intimate meditation prompted by Poussin's famous sequence of paintings depicting baptism, coming of age, marriage, penance and so on, Seven Sacraments, an Artangel project premiered at the Brighton Festival last week, has burgeoned into something very grand. It is now a dramatic oratorio, complete with orchestra, soloists, vast choir, and even dancers. Yet the message it conveys is not the rock-solid affirmative of Handel and co. It's the unsteady questioning of Mr Ordinary, who is none too sure whether and what he believes in these days but who, undergoing some undefined mid-life crisis, has discovered a nostalgic respect for the old forms. (Jenny Gilbert - read full article)

Evening Standrad, 28 May 1998:
"Director Neil Bartlett rendered Pousin's devotional series Seven Sacraments for the stage last year, to extensive - if occassionally bemused - acclaim. This time, set to Nicholas Bloomfield's new oratio, performed by a 150-strong cast (and conducted by Nicholas Kok), the experience should be all the more overwhelming." (Tim Lusher)

Daily Telegraph, 19 May 1998:
"Last year Bartlett presented it as a monologue at the Royal London Hospital; this year he has expanded it to a "dramatic oratorio", with music by Nicholas Bloomfield. Soberly suited, speaking in a hushed voice, Bartlett wanders up the nave and paces the altar, reflecting on the price of our culture's loss of the comfortable words of the old liturgy and the fund of shared experience in religious ritual. His position emerges as deeply conservative, yet uneasy, unresolved." (Rupert Christiansen)

Church Times, 5 June 1998:
"Children, a hundred of them from Lowes Wong Junior School at this performance were crucial both to the dance and drama elements of the performance, erupting. wilfully into an adult world to vanish as ghost children in scatterings of laughter. Life, glimpsed only at milestones left us musically with an elusive and fragmentary impression, a mosaic of sound from the East of England Orchestra punctuated at times with snatches of familiar melodies and hymn tunes." (Pat Ashworth)

Time Out, 27 May 1998:
"His "dramatic oratorio" sees composer Nicolas Bloomfield, the East of England Orchestra, sundry local choirs and schoolchildren, and six dancers synchronise their spiritual confusion in big churches England-wide while Bartlett gently ruminates on the godless vacuum those sureties leave in their wake. This ambitious exercise heralds the end of the road for Bartlett's company Gloria." (Brian Logan)

Times Literary Supplement, 12 June 1998:
"Announced as a swansong by Gloria, the music-theatre concept initiated in 1988 by Neil Barlett with the composer Nicolas Bloomfield and the choreographer Leah Hausman, it builds on Bartlett's earlier performance piece The Seven Sacraments of Nicolas Poussin, to explore religious rites of passage, from Baptism and Confirmation to the Eucharist and Extreme Unction." (Jonathan Keates)