Write your abstract
here.
St Eusebius battles with the devil daily until he
wins a
final triumph
and the devil departs. (The standard
temptations, wealth, power and women, none of which
makes
much of an impression anymore: the images of these are
projected, perhaps to their disadvantage, on a
petrified
hill of his accumulated dung.) The devil successfully
expelled, he can settle in to enjoy his hermit cave and
its
giddy unimaginable deprivations. But a
greater threat
arrives: St Pior, a rival hermit and holy man.
Pior claims that God has sent him to make this cave
his
lasting retreat. This is
unacceptable to Eusebius, as
Eusebius' presence is unacceptable to Pior: both can
live
with almost indescribable deprivation and hardship, but
neither can bear to share his dwelling with another
living
soul. They dispute the matter with words, with
miracles,
with blows.
(Eusebius has put aside every human vanity but
snobbery: he argues at one point that his sacrifices to
become a hermit saint are greater because he was born a
wealthy aristocrat, Pior a poor farmer. What did Pior
give
up by comparison?)
Eusebius wins the last savage, brutal fight,
strangling
Pior with the chain he wears for mortification of the
flesh, kneels by his dung heap to say a prayer of
thanks to
God---but he is interrupted by a horror beyond any he
has
yet endured---the sight, across 17 centuries, of St.
Pior
and St Eusebius taking final bows, to thunderous
applause,
at the end of a production of Peter Barnes' NOONDAY
DEMONS.