A vivid and well-mounted German-language drama imagines what it was like in the Wittenberg of 1517 for young monk Martin Luther and his friends. It does a fine job of getting across the corruption of the church at the time: one scene sees a (literally) fiery preacher using every theatrical trick in the book to extort money from the poor. Meanwhile Luther is prevailed upon to paste his rebellious pamphlet on a church door and so lights the touchpaper on centuries of religious conflict

The Catholic church has excommunicated Luther and condemned him as a heretic, but the Reformation can no longer be stopped. Whilst in hiding, and widely believed to be dead, Luther translates the Bible into German for the first time so that the ordinary people can read it.

Simon Schama argues that it is impossible to understand how Shakespeare came to belong 'to all time' without understanding just how much he was of his time.