Full disclosure from the outset: I am a card-carrying Sterne enthusiast and have been an occasional freelance associate of the Laurence Sterne Trust for nearly two years on and off, first as an intern and subsequently as a contributor to its exhibitions. That said, please be under no illusions. Upon my return home to Sterne’s country in April, I was a touch dismayed to observe his tercentenary celebrations start out on a weak note with Richard Hurford’s altogether unsatisfactory and at times downright frustrating absurdist adaptation of Tristram Shandy at York’s Theatre Royal. iShandy was a mess of a work that responded to its source material in the glibbest of fashions by merely choking up its 21/2 hour running time with too many half-baked vignettes to swallow. Hurford was immoderately eager to simply ransack Sterne’s novel for literary tricks and empty verbiage in support of his own central theme of meaninglessness, and the resultant play seemed to court an imaginary audience of gauche pedants only capable of reading Tristam Shandy through a myopia-inducing glass of “po-mo lit-crit” buzzwords. Important caveat: this is the opinion of an independent researcher and writer, not that of the Trust I occasionally work with. We do not always see eye-to-eye on all things Sterne, and nor should we. He remains a writer whose legacy invites spats, and I like to believe that any dispute over even trivial aspects of his work is in keeping with the invigorating spirit of Shandeasm. The ultimate pleasure of being a student of Sterne is that he grants us license to sweat the small stuff.

And then I often wonder if it is even feasible to make a decent fist of Shandy’s extraordinary sprawl on stage? Perhaps it simply demands too much of any one theatre practitioner’s powers? Despite Sterne’s own well-documented enthusiasm for role-playing as characters from his most famous novel, Tristram does not adapt well. ‘Spurting thy ink about thy table and thy books, – as if thy pen and thy ink, thy book and thy furniture cost thee nothing’: to spill ink is to haemorrhage vital fluids in Sterne’s novel and we never fail to feel the loss of ink when Shandy is dragged into the theatre. Sterne so intricately takes advantage of the codex as a unique and complex form of technology in his fiction that the content seems utterly bound to the form; Tristram’s life and the world he inhabits are so completely tied up with the creative act of writing them into existence that to tear the printed page away cannot but inflict terminal damage. Alas, to sum up, the metaleptic lack of any distinction between writing and living in Tristram Shandy renders its hero simply incapable of surviving the transition from page to stage. With this bare fact in mind, the Laurence Sterne Trust’s decision to focus the biggest event of their public tercentenary celebrations on Laurence Sterne the homilist rather than Laurence Sterne the novelist proved a shrewd move. It also allowed them to serve us all an important reminder: Though lauded by the likes of Woolf, Calvino and Kundera as the master progenitor of experimental non-teleological narrative forms, Sterne’s interpretations of scripture made his name amongst the eighteenth-century cognoscenti as much as his fiction. Where his novels demand moments of almost solipsistic introspection from their reader that prove difficult to simulate within the theatre, his broadly latitudinarian sermons come ready-made for us to appreciate as performances. And boy what glorious performances you can fashion from them!

‘A Voice from the Pulpit’ endeavoured to celebrate the sermon as communal performance; however I would by no means describe it as a community outreach event and the distinction is an important one to draw. The Laurence Sterne Trust wisely (at least in my view) avoided the temptation to overburden the evening with historical context, endless exposition, or laboured commentary. This was not an event that held a condescending hand out, but rather one that trusted its audience to lean in and attune their ears. There is of course a time and a place for theatre as education, but not when sheer religious drama and sublimity are at stake. Ticketholders each received a souvenir pack upon arrival containing an elegantly printed faux eighteenth-century impression of the sermon shortly to be delivered (not a bibliographically authentic facsimile – an important detail to note), a succinct graphic storyboard of the biblical tale that Sterne sought to elucidate, and a programme of the music to be performed. This was just enough material required to navigate the evening whilst still demanding a firm creative and interpretative engagement from the audience, and around me I observed a polarised crowd made up of those fervently following the text of the sermon to its conclusion and those who had given up completely after the first minute or so in order to resign themselves to an hour or so of boredom. The split was 50/50; Sterne’s syntax can be knotty and his web of textual references complex and unfamiliar to the wholly uninitiated. Though wary of charges of elitism, I think the balance was well struck. This was an evening that yielded pleasures for those who brought their A-game, so to speak, and for me it affirmed a long-held belief that it doesn’t always hurt to make a few demands of your audience. And sometimes it even pays to play to the fans a little!

The choice of “The Case of Hezekiah and the Messengers” for the evening’s master text served the humour of the event aptly and demonstrated an acuteness of taste and judgement sorely lacking in Hurford’s earlier Sternean performance. Thematically, we were dealing in traditional latitudinarian matters of conscience and community, and listening to David Bradley’s warm, earthy projection of the text resound through the Minster’s ornate choir I did momentarily suspect that something of the spirit of Sterne had indeed arrived to gently rebuke us of the impulse to strip fine deeds of fine intentions. Mirroring his predecessor Henry Fielding’s disgust of novelists who inadvertently divulged the ‘poverty and meanness’ of their characters’ interior lives, Sterne’s sermon ultimately asks us to judge deeds purely on appearance rather than through any unjust presumption of shrouded motives. Those amongst the audience aware of a few of the more sordid biographical details of Sterne’s life might have discerned something akin to an apologia pro sua vita hidden in this message, but perhaps I am myself being a touch unkind to the great man and should hereafter pay more heed to his admonishment. Whatever originally induced it, his sentiment has ultimately aged well. Like his great Augustan forebears, Sterne rejected Antinomianism and the inner light of eighteenth-century religious dissent to assert a message of intellectual and spiritual generosity that couldn’t fail to chime well on an evening where all and sundry had gathered to celebrate his own contribution to 300 years of York’s social and artistic life.

David Bradley’s lean yet imposing figure corresponded well with the iconography of Sterne, a long-term wasting consumptive who nevertheless seems to physically dominate (and in some ways distort) every picture in which he features. To the current generation of teenagers, Bradley is most readily recognizable as Argus Filch, the malevolent caretaker of the Harry Potter films. To me, his brief but memorable role as Arthur Webley, the incomprehensible weapon-hording farmer of Edgar Wright’s frenetic action comedy mash-up Hot Fuzz, still looms large. Nevertheless Bradley worked hard to dispel these ghosts for an hour, delivering an emphatic yet reserved performance that conjured before us a sort of simulacrum of Sterne – a copy with no true original. We never got the sense that Bradley was pretending to be the real deal, and this was perhaps the key to his effectiveness. ‘A Voice from the Pulpit’ proudly wore its artifice on its sleeves and portrayed the homilist as a figure of pure theatre. And after all, when he was delivering forth a choice lesson for the delight and edification of slews of dignitaries, what else was Sterne other than first and foremost a performance artist? ‘I wrote not to be fed, but to be famous’: indeed, the one facet of Sterne that has always been most readily apparent is his self-conscious enjoyment of playing in pursuit of applause. Bradley’s performance portrayed in turn a man delivering a performance on the grand stage of orthodox Anglican faith, and this evocation of total drama fitted readily with a sermon that encourages the performance of good deeds as an end in itself. There was no ill-judged attempt to reach toward some other more “authentic” man beneath the cloth, just as Sterne and Fielding warn us against hastily assuming that we should delve into the ever-mysterious inner lives of others at will in order to pass judgement. Looking back, the neatly stylised faux impression of the sermon we each received upon arrival hinted early on that ‘A Voice from the Pulpit’ was to be refreshingly free from the false binds of authenticity, free to present the sermon as sheer sublime religious drama with Bradley’s version of Sterne acting as a black-clad impresario.

So as to better expound my admiration for what the Laurence Sterne Trust managed to stage on 14th October, it is perhaps worth mentioning that ‘A Voice from the Pulpit’ was not the first recital of a Sterne sermon that I had attended this year. Stillington Parish Church staged a mock-up of a historic Anglican service back in May that rigidly took its cue from an eighteenth-century impression of Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, with Sterne’s discourse on private and public worship providing the homily. The evening was not without merit – the aforementioned sermon chosen for the service contains some of Sterne’s sturdiest religious rhetoric and was recited with gusto, a smattering of the audience (including yours truly) enjoyed harmlessly playing at eighteenth-century dress-up, and the churchgoers appeared on the whole appreciative of the attempt to recognize Sterne’s local links (alongside that of Coxwold and Sutton on the Forest, Sterne enjoyed the living of Stillington up until his death in 1768). Nevertheless, its ethos of verisimilitude at the expense of all else begot an undeniable air of aridity that in retrospect throws the Laurence Sterne Trust’s achievements into sharp relief. Where Stillington Church’s event aimed to slavishly recreate, the Laurence Sterne Trust aimed first and foremost to celebrate. And celebrate they did. David Bradley’s reading was punctuated and augmented by a superb original oratorio premiered at the event by acclaimed composer David Owen Norris. With string quartet, square piano and natural trumpet, Norris bolstered an unusually taut and harmonically svelte choral restatement of Sterne’s words that seemed to swirl and shimmer gloriously across the vast compass of York’s medieval Church. Though composed for a period ensemble, this was an earnest and at times abstruse composition aimed squarely at twenty-first century ears. It was music able to suffuse and make new a six hundred year old stone edifice and a two hundred and fifty year old sermon simultaneously. The performance was by no means flawlessly even, and the evening started out with an unfortunate reminder that the natural trumpet is a fiendishly difficult instrument to master; however the soaring ambition of Norris’s work was always apparent, the aim always noble, and the superbly schooled children’s choir was always at the ready to rescue the evening from its occasional lulls.

And so from a fairly inauspicious start, 2013 flowered into a vintage year of good humour for the Laurence Sterne Trust that culminated in an evening befitting Sterne’s stature as Yorkshire’s first man of letters. This tercentenary performance was to be no lazy idolization of the past, but rather an emphatic answer to the question “do Sterne’s eccentric art and avant-garde sensibility still course through the veins of our city today?”: Yes, and long may they continue to do so!

‘Voice from the Pulpit’ took place on October 14th 2013. Above image used with the kind permission of the Laurence Sterne Trust.