Jonathan Holmes explores the poet's struggle to choose between the church and his carnal desires... A...mesmerising play
Lauren Paxman
The Stage
Into Thy Hands, Jonathan Holmes's passionately intellectual play about the metaphysical love poet and, later, Dean of St Paul's, John Donne . . . The dialogue is an adroitly inflected mix of the Jacobean and ... Read morethe modern
Paul Taylor
Independent
What is refreshing...is to hear questions of faith being debated in a contemporary play.
Michael Billington
Guardian
Holmes's text knits Donne's own writings to dialogue of his own making, keeping to the playfully wordy idiom of the period. The result is undeniably dense, but articulated with such a sure sense of rhythm and purpose that its dramatic intent is never less than clear . . . Funny and sexy without feeling forced or intrusive, the joy of Into Thy Hands is its shameless blurring of registers into the naturalistic muddle of life. We make real inroads into the philosophy of translation, the role and impact of the vernacular Bible, the moral issues of the church patronage system of the seventeenth century, but we also get a vivid portrait of a marriage, of the isolation of the woman of independent means and the vulnerability of ageing beauty. It's a delight to see theatre so utterly sure of itself, and hear writing so unapologetically scholarly.
Alexandra Coghlan
The Arts Desk
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