ALEXANDER SMITH delves into the strange work of Aleister Crowley, courtesy of John Burns’ Fringe-bound one-man play

HIGHLAND-BASED actor and writer John Burns previewed his Fringe-bound endeavour to root underneath the throng of myths and ambiguities surrounding one of the twentieth century’s most controversial characters.

The play attempted to take the audience through the life of libertine occultist, magician, writer and self-styled ‘wickedest man in the world’ Aleister Crowley in just over an hour; and despite the ambitious undertaking, with A Passion for Evil, Burns manages to deliver a successfully chilling piece of theatre.

The one act play begins with an elderly, poverty-stricken Crowley backstage in a provincial theatre, consumed with resentment at being reduced to near curiosity in order to survive. Here Crowley delivers a brutally succinct confessional covering the entirety of his life, re-living significant episodes whilst counting down calls to curtain and flirting with suicide as he promises to perform a demon-inducing ritual which may cost him his life.

With such a wealth of material on Crowley and his works, most of what Burns deals with will already be familiar to anyone with an interest. Burns’s portrayal of ‘The Beast’, however, is peppered with intriguing ambiguities and subtle allusion which works against the arrogance of many of the statements.

An example of this is the intimation of self-deception regarding Crowley’s relationship with substances. Burns presents Crowley almost attempting to persuade himself he can indulge with impunity, whilst explicitly highlighting his powerlessness over his lengthy opium addiction and the drug-seeking behaviour which would lead to him being refused pharmaceutical heroin shortly before his death.

Another area which the play is attentive towards was Crowley’s prowess as a mountaineer. When dealing with the ill-fated attempt on Kanchenjunga in which four of his party perished, we see Crowley uncomfortably negotiating an emotional line between remorse and justification, but in keeping with character, although again unconvincingly, he eventually veers towards the latter.

On the whole, Burns convincingly presents Crowley as a resentful and charged mass of contradictions and character defects, riddled with self-obsession, chronic rebelliousness, unremorseful arrogance and uncompromising in his pursuit of pleasure.

Throughout, the pace is pretty unrelenting as the audience are offered a graphic barrage of lurid allegations and vitriolic responses, although the tempo is broken to great effect as Crowley describes his marriage of convenience to Rose Edith Kelly transforming into a temporarily blissful period. Here the protagonist is almost gushing when describing their extended honeymoon which took in the famous trip to Egypt which led to The Book of the Law in 1904.

The play ends with Crowley coaxing the audience to trail him into the occult, and amends appear to be offered to his late preacher father, whose death Burns offers as the primary motivation for Crowley’s refutation of Christianity and embrace of occult practise and excess, although morality play territory is cleverly avoided.

Despite the velocity of the piece, time period, locale and context are given attention, which reminds us of the moral climate against which Crowley’s lifestyle was judged. Burns also successfully manages to condense over seventy years into a play which is entertaining, uncomfortable, thought-provoking, enervating, challenging and complete.

(See website below for Fringe dates, podcast and YouTube trailer links)


© Alexander Smith, 2010

Links

• A Passion For Evil