In Extremis (play)

In Extremis: The Story of Abelard and Heloise
Abelard and Heloise
Written by	Howard Brenton
Characters	Heloise, Abelard, Bernard of Clairvaux
Date premiered	27 August 2006
Original language	English
Setting	12th century France, particularly Paris

In Extremis: The Story of Abelard & Heloise is a play by Howard Brenton on the story of Heloise and Abelard, which premiered at the Globe Theatre on 27 August 2006 with a 15 performance run. The play was directed by John Dove with design by Michael Taylor, and music by William Lyons. It was revived for a 2-week run from 15 May 2007 with the same director and most of the same cast.

An early draft of the play was written in 1997 at the University of California at Davis during Brenton's term as its Granada Fellow, and performed by MFA students of its Drama Department (with Sarah Pia Anderson directing).

In twelfth century Paris, a new spirit of philosophical and religious enquiry is growing. Within its vanguard is Peter Abelard, a man of great learning, independence of mind, and sensuality. When he enters into an affair with his equally brilliant but disastrously connected student Heloise, his more conservative enemies find just the pretext they need to discredit him and in so doing starts a war of ideas. Through the joy and suffering exhibited in this love story set in the Middle Ages, Brenton explores the relationships between logic and religion, humanism and fundamentalism, and faith and power, and projects modern debates on fundamentalism, the Enlightenment and feminism back on this historical situation.

Abelard, arguing with his teacher William of Champeaux, sets up a new, dialectic philosophical school of his own, which proves popular and is even fashionable at the royal court of France. One of his followers is Heloise, with whom he also starts a sexual affair, under the guise of private tuition. His school's success worries Bernard of Clairvaux, who feels it is subjecting divine revelation to reason and may thus destroy the Roman Catholic Church and Christianity itself, but for now he merely subjects Abelard to surveillance rather than opposition. Bernard and Abelard do meet, briefly, at the court when Bernard goes there to force the king to give back lands he had seized illegally from a French bishop. Abelard tries to explain that he is not trying to destroy religion but to better understand it through reason using the brain and intellect that God has given him. However, Bernard will not accept this and refuses to accept Abelard's challenge to dispute with him publicly, as Bernard dogmatically feels he is right and Abelard is wrong and so there is nothing to dispute.