I confess until last night I had never seen that renowned work of early '70s rock'n'roll, Jesus Christ Superstar; nor had I ever had the desire to see it. The tickets were free, however, so off I trotted to the Liverpool Empire to see Andrew Lloyd-Webber's ultra-groovy musical based on the events of the last few days of Jesus' life.

Brilliant.

This was our church choir's annual theatre trip, and one old lady was worried it might be heretical and lead youngsters astray. I have heard the rumour before that the show is faintly blasphemous, though it's a mystery to me why. Is it the open-to-interpretation kind of closeness between Jesus and Mary Magdalene? The broadly sympathetic treatment of Judas, from whose perspective most of the play takes place? The rather self-doubting Jesus represented, a Jesus who gets a bit fed-up with all the attention and ends up telling the crowds to piss off (albeit in more Christlike language) and thinking his mission has gone well and truly down the pan? Certainly Jesus Christ Superstar presents us with a more human, down-to-earth, ambiguous Jesus than tradition has often portrayed. But blasphemous or heretical?

The only thing I could imagine was that we were going to get to the end of the show and discover that Jesus remained in his grave, his mission a miserable failure. Ironically, the ending was the only disappointing thing for me -- this Jesus certainly did rise from the dead, but it was all over and done with so quickly, the inattentive might have missed it. This Jesus is restored miraculously to life, appearing on stage in dazzling, stunning white, but it's too abrupt, and there's no real build-up, or any sense of connection with what's gone before. The resurrection felt like one of those "I woke up and it was all a dream" endings that you write when you're seven. It felt almost hasty and tacked-on.

Still, as an encore, the company reprised the most hummable of Lloyd-Webber's tunes from the show -- not the relatively tacky title song, but Hosanna, a number I hadn't heard before -- and it made a rousing and moving end to the show. I loved how when Jesus emerged from the tomb he embraced Mary on one side and Judas on the other, although I don't know whether that was in the original script or peculiar to this particular company.

The highly human Jesus was complemented by a highly human band of disciples, who are heard to muse at the last supper, "Always hoped that I'd be an apostle/Knew that I would make it if I tried/Then when we retire we can write the gospels/So they'll still talk about us when we've died." That's one way to look at it, I suppose.

What other delights did Jesus Christ Superstar hold? Well, Herod was hilariously camp, like a pantomime dame, with his servants hitching up their togas to dance the can-can in the background as he challenged Jesus with such inspired taunts as "Prove to me that you're divine - change my water into wine" and "Prove to me that you're no fool - walk across my swimming pool". The score moved from lilting guitar ballad to heavy rock to funky psychedelic without any hint of disconnection.

If this one comes to your area, check it out. Wonderful.

The epic tale of Ben Hur is being revived with thundering horses, blazing lights, dramatic music and a huge cast in an arena spectacular which gets its world premiere in London on Thursday.

The mammoth-scale production, entitled "Ben Hur Live", will see gladiator duels, pirate ship attacks and real high-speed chariot races tearing around the arenas of Europe before heading worldwide.

"It's a mixture of the power of a rock concert, the speed of a musical, the magic of a great movie and the passion of a Greek tragedy," producer Franz Abraham told AFP.

"My new book is on the question of memory. My question is, How do those who love remember, especially the injustices that others have done them, or the guilt that they have incurred? Memories can be both a shield and a sword. They are ambiguous. Conflicts around the world are motivated by certain readings of the past. So how does one remember so as to heal wounds rather than deepen them?

"We may need 'eschatological forgetting.' To forgive is to forget. Augustine, at the end of City of God, says that he will remember certain evils -- the ones he has committed, not the ones he has forgiven others for."

Starting with John Locke, Volf says, the West has defined the self by what one remembers. That has been the stable feature of modernity, that we are what our stories are. This means that memories of evil often organize our lives.

"But is that desirable for a world of perfect love?" Volf asks. "Only those who are willing not to remember certain things can remember themselves into the telos of perfect love." Volf does not use the term "forgetting"; his vision is of a messianic age so ennobled by joy, love and embrace of the neighbor that there will be a "not-coming-to-mind," a leave-taking of worldly memories. This, he suggests, is what is meant by Nehemiah's promise of "the joy of Jerusalem." While that day will come only with Jesus' return, we can, in the meantime, strive to approximate that not-coming-to-mind of memories that would provoke anger or aggravate violence.

Miroslav Volf, speaking of his then work-in-progress, now published as The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company (2006). From an article by Mark Oppenheimer in The Christian Century, January 11, 2003, pp. 18-23. Copyright by The Christian Century Foundation.

ABSTRACT: Postmodern historians have declared the end of history. The narratives which arranged people and events in a series of causal relationships have fallen into ruin. Only memory remains – cluttered, subjective, multiplicitous, and only interested in the past inasmuch as it impacts the present. The result of this shift on dramatic storytellers is two-fold. First, they must now pick through the wreckage of the past in order to construct their characters’ present and secondly, their stories have changed shape in order to reflect the wreckage of history. The postmodern memory play is characterized by a wandering narrative rife with contradictions, starts and stops, jump cuts, and deliberate incompletion. Martin Sherman’s Rose is a one-woman monologue play where the title character picks through the pieces of her life as a Jew of the Diaspora. Her memories intermingle with movie images and her life account is a series of seemingly wholly disparate lives sloppily spliced together. Yet all her accounts add up to a whole in the person that stands before the audience. She stands at the precipice between the past and the future. And so we have a perfect case study for what memory, at this interesting critical juncture, is meant to do.