The remarkable true story of the odd couple in the Vatican - the two living Popes
Anthony McCarten is a BAFTA-winning writer who divides his time between London, Los Angeles and Munich. His screenplay for The Theory of Everything which he wrote and produced won a BAFTA and was nominated for an Oscar. He wrote the screenplay for the Oscar-nominated Bohemian Rhapsody and his previous book, Darkest Hour, was a Sunday Times Number One bestseller.
A cracking read . . . With due respect to those talented thesps,
they will have to go some to convey all the nuances and
contradictions, ambiguities and embarrassments, dark secrets and
outright skulduggeries that McCarten crams into his 200-odd pages .
. . engrossing -- Richard Morrison * The Times *
I learned things from the script I didn't know. I just thought,
"Can that be right? Were we that perilously close?" And so it just
grabbed me.
Provides a compelling look at life and politics in the Vatican
today * Vanity Fair, This Winter's Best Nonfiction Reads *
Anthony McCarten has an astonishing knack of transforming a
familiar story into a new tale, and one that is revealing and
sometimes challenging. Now he has done so once again with The
Pope, a beguiling tale of ecclesiastical plotting and intrigue
that resembles a sort of bloodless Borgias. It may be a book about
how two men reached the holiest pinnacle of the Roman Catholic
Church, but when the clouds of incense clear we are left with an
awful lot of sinning. The papacy is supposed to be infallible, but
thanks to McCarten's deft lifting of the Vatican's scarlet curtains
what we see is the breeding ground for one of the greatest scandals
of our times in which conspiracy and vanity are on display to a
terrifying extent
[On the play version] Why did he do it? Why did Pope Benedict XVI,
that most traditional of pontiffs, break with tradition and resign
in 2013, ceding the way to his reformist rival, Cardinal Bergoglio?
That's the problem at the heart of this compelling new problem play
by Anthony McCarten - and, sensibly, the playwright leaves it more
or less unsolved. He presents us with two contrasting and eternal
characters, both at breaking point: the wavering conservative and
the reluctant liberal. The playwright's own sympathies seem to be
with Bergoglio, yet, despite the relatable ordinariness Nicholas
Woodeson brings to that role, it is Anton Lesser's shy,
candyfloss-haired Benedict who, against the odds, emerges as the
more fascinating presence: the one who can play Mozart, however
imperfectly, the one who attempts little jokes, far less polished
than his rival's hail-fellow shtick, yet more amusing for their
faults. McCarten, who wrote the screenplay for Darkest Hour, has a
gift for creating intimate dramas from public biographical
property. Here the theatre becomes a confessional, with the
audience asked to grant absolution to two flawed but pious priests.
* The Times, ???? *
[On the film screenplay] Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins deliver
a sit-back-and-marvel double-act masterclass that will be spoken of
in the same breath as De Niro and Pacino in Heat . . . the
triple-whammy impact of McCarten's script, Meirelles's direction
and, mostly, the two lead performances creates a completely
credible reality, at times indecently moving . . . there are big
ideas in here too * The Times, ***** *
[On the film] Essentially a papal buddy movie, a mesmerising
two-hander, and one of the finest films of either performer's
career -- Kevin Maher * The Times *
[On the film screenplay] If I like the script, that's the reason
I'm doing it -- Jonathan Pryce
Anthony McCarten . . . after The Theory of Everything,
Darkest Hour and Bohemian Rhapsody, has rather
cornered the market in glossy biographical dramas * Guardian *
This engrossing double biography of the chalk-and-cheese pontiffs
Francis (the "slum bishop") and Benedict ("God's rottweiler") is
full of drama, dark secrets and Vatican skulduggery. * The Times
*
[On the film] Oh my word. I just loved #thetwopopes. Such a
mesmerising film. And so delighted they didn't traduce Benedict.
The chemistry between him and Francis was so moving. It's on
Netflix now. And it is definitely worth watching -- Giles Fraser
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