Devil's Passion or Easter in Hell, The: A divine comedy in one act (Modern Plays) - Softcover

Justin Butcher's The Devil's Passion is a welcome antidote to the dull and done to death, a light sandblasting for jaded souls. It's also a timely piece, casting Jesus in the role of extremist preacher, whose dangerous ideas have the potential to cause untold instability in the Middle East and here at home . . . And while a passion play from the Devil's perspective may naturally evoke a gleefully heretical flavour, Butcher's beautifully-written piece is as reverent as such a post-Screwtape exercise can be while still entertaining ... Perhaps the most poignant moment is when Butcher has Satan tempt Jesus on the cross to give it up and pack it in by showing him how generations of Christians will sanitise his sacrifice, allowing gold and silversmiths to smooth his suffering into decorative mannequins for church walls and necklaces. * Huffington Post * Powerful, imaginative and marvelously written . . . an extraordinary and original creation * Sir Paul Scofield on Justin Butcher's "Scaramouche Jones" * Extraordinary solo piece by Justin Butcher . . . hilarious, picaresque and terrifying * Sunday Times on "Scaramouche Jones" * Fascinating, poignant, funny * The Times on "Scaramouche Jones" * Justin Butcher's gloriously elegiac prose . . . reverberates in the memory * Irish Independent on "Scaramouche Jones" * "Unique . . . stunning . . . a new kind of theatre" * Metro on "Scaramouche Jones" *

Within the next hour, our operatives will isolate, engage and capture or kill the notorious leader of the most extreme, dangerous and contagious ideology to emerge in the modern era, whose terror activities represent the gravest threat to our interests across the region and the wider world. I refer, of course, to the radical preacher and populist demagogue Y'shua Bar-Yessuf - the man known, by way of shorthand to our operatives, as "Jesus†?.

Satan, the narrator of Justin Butcher's one-man play who is looking out for our best interests, is on a mission to harness the ways of the dangerous extremist preacher Jesus. Jesus' radical teachings and popularity have the potential to wreak havoc in the Middle East. This is exactly the sort of man the government warn us of, again and again.

This clever and evocative passion play from the devil's perspective considers Jesus' relevance to contemporary issues, and retells the story of Christ's life from the perspective of the enemy. The Devil's Passion received its world premiere in June 2015 at St James's, Piccadilly, and was revived and toured in 2016.