Jesus My Boy at Saint Albin’s. The Christ Story Becomes a Family Narrative.
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Photo from St Lawrence Shakespeare Company
This monologue, created in 1998 in England by author/actor (John Dowie) and then performed by Tom Conti at the Haymarket theatre the same year, is now appearing in the Ottawa area thanks to Ian Farthing, better known to us as the director of the St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival in Prescott. Yes Mr. Farthing is an actor, who has worked and trained in the UK, has done musical theatre in Toronto and London. Now Farthing has taken on the fairly demanding role of the carpenter Joseph, the father of Jesus, as he tells the story of the nativity and the life of Christ from the point of view of a working class fellow, who happens to be the father of Jesus, as well as a poor Jew living under Roman occupation. That obviously changes his perspective of things. He has a very tolerant and unmacho vision of the Virgin birth which was surprising; he has a decidedly good knowledge of the Torah, of the squabbles between the different Jewish movements cohabiting in Judea at that period, and a pretty good political intuition about the way colonising Romans knew how to manipulate their own colonized, making it fairly easy to get rid of this trouble maker whom they eventually crucified.