This review was written by new DCist contributor, Christopher Klimek

Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, newly revived at the Keegan Theatre, is probably forever doomed to be stuck in the present. First staged in 1960, and dramatizing events that occurred more than four centuries earlier — Thomas More’s refusal-by-silence to sanction King Henry VIII’s divorce — the play seems contemporary, as martyr stories inevitably will. After all, who was Thomas More, if not a man who gave his life to stand up against a tyrant seeking to expand the range of executive power?

Many things, it turns out. The patron saint of lawyers, More was, like Shaft, a complicated man. While what compelled him to resign his post as King Henry’s Lord Chancellor was the King’s demand for “submission of the clergy”, effectively placing the royalty above the church, it’s hard for a modern audience to forget that the specific ill More fell on his sword to oppose was, after all, divorce.

So to accept him as a hero is a hard sell to say the least, even moreso now than when Bolt wrote his play. Bolt’s script emphasizes More’s brilliant scholarship and unimpeachable honesty, avoiding the traits that would further dampen his latter-day appeal—the enthusiasm with which he jailed and burned “heretics,” for example (Today we call them Lutherans.). But thanks to Bolt’s sparkling oratory in defense of principle and conscience, this is a play to which true believers of all persuasions can bring their own prejudices.