A NUN WITH GOOD HABITS
STELLA GONET was concerned that nuns get a bad rap.
The actress is going to play a nun — Sister Aloysius, to be precise — in a revival of John Patrick Shanley’s gripping play Doubt, A Parable.
The sister is a no-nonsense principal of a church school in the Bronx who becomes involved in a situation where a priest may have behaved improperly with a student.
‘She’s got fantastic moral certainty,’ Gonet told me. ‘She’s letting the doubts come — but she’s so hard.’
She was pleased that Shanley dedicated the play to those ‘much-maligned people who do so much good’. She attended a Catholic primary school in Scotland, and though she was ‘weirdly scared’ of some of the nuns, she admired their charity work, and the way they were ‘basically holding up social services’.
I saw the original production in New York with Cherry Jones and we, the audience, were on the edge of our seats. Meryl Streep was in the film version.
Doubt will run at Southwark Playhouse from September 6.
Gonet will arrive in South London via Frinton-on-Sea, where she’ll be playing Florence Foster Jenkins (another Streep film part) in Glorious! at the Frinton Summer Theatre from August 8-12.