Playwright Howard Brenton, wrote Eternal Love – originally called In Extremis – for students at the University of California, where he was resident dramatist. Dominic Dromgoole picked the play up for staging at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, where he’s artistic director. Brenton’s other work includes Pravda, The Romans In Britain, Weapons Of Happiness, Brassneck and Anne Boleyn 

What attracted you to the story of Abelard and Heloise?

OH, it was such a great conflict. Two views of the world really and that conflict is still with us. Abelard and Heloise believed in reason and exploration of the world. They were modern really, all those centuries ago. It was between them and Bernard of Clairvaux, a great monk who believed in instinctive religion. The worship of nature, not questioning creation, but absorbing it.

In other words, he was a fundamentalist. So that conflict was a fantastic thing to write about.

It’s about love, isn’t it?

Two kinds of love. I’ve always struggled for a title. I originally called it In Extremis. In extreme. And I didn’t want to call it Abelard and Heloise because there was a great old play done in the 1960s. I thought I can’t nick the title. There is a sort of playwright’s mafia about these things. I thought Eternal Love was a better title, because there are two kinds of love in it – physical love and love of ideas, which turn into a kind of religious love near the end of the play.

Who wears the trousers in the relationship between Abelard and Heloise?

She does a lot of the driving. And she did. She didn’t want to get married; he insisted on getting married. She drove the religious passion in many ways. You see it in the letters that survived between them. She was ambitious for him. They were an extraordinary couple. They were sort of one mind in a way, which is rather wonderful.

How much research did you put aside for the sake of a good play?

Writers are not academics. We read a lot and you find what you’re retaining may work. You have a sort of tunnel-vision. What you’ve got to do is get into the mindset of these people. They were very different from us. They were medieval, they had medieval minds. When you’ve got into the mindset they had, then you can write it. It was before ideas of vicious judgment in hell. They didn’t talk about judgment day, they talked of being on a journey through life. There was a different mindset to Christianity then. Christianity was still being thought out in Europe at that time.

What were Abelard and Heloise like?

Abelard was outrageously reckless. So was she. He slept with his students. The thoughts and virtues of really great people like Abelard are so intertwined, you can’t separate them out. If he hadn’t been such a randy dog, he might not have had such a great philosophical mind. The two go together. He was incredibly famous in his day and very influential. He founded the University of Paris and his name is written above the main entrance to this day.

How is it writing for the Globe?

The Globe gives you incredible freedom, but is also terrifying because it’s the Big Fellow’s theatre. You feel it’s haunted and there’s a figure in the upper gallery looking down. It puts the fear of god into you, writing at the Globe.