An unholy mess for Peter, Paul and Mary
CHRISTIANITY is based on a con, proclaims the new play at the statefunded National. Christ did not die on the Cross but survived crucifixion because it was a rainy day. The Romans wanted to get home and failed to finish him off.
Joseph of Arimathea slipped a well- placed bribe, and all that business with the tomb was nonsense. A few months later, Jesus heard that Saul of Tarsus, dreaded Christian hunter, was on the warpath. So he slipped out at night, found Saul’s camp on the road to Damascus, and went up to him pretending to have risen from the dead.
Spooked, Saul fell for the lie about resurrection and changed to Paul the great believer.
Howard Brenton’s play is without doubt blasphemous and sacrilegious.
However, it is also an exceedingly bloodless piece of drama, so highbrow that it is unlikely to provoke much real distress among those of us who potter along to church most weeks.
Many of the characters are weakly drawn, little more than pieces on the plot’s chessboard. The pace plods, there is no great tension and the wit is sparse. Mr Brenton displays plenty of learning but little visceral emotion.
THEaction takes place in the 1st century AD and consists of flashbacks to Paul’s life while he and St Peter ( Lloyd Owen) sit in a Roman prison awaiting their execution.
It’s a modern- dress affair, complete with the military fatigues and automatic rifles that have become such a theatrical cliche.
Mary Magdalene (Kellie Bright), who is presented as Jesus’s exhooker wife — shades of The Da Vinci Code — with tattoos on her buttocks and a foul mouth, has an Estuary accent.
One of her lines expresses her disbelief of the idea of the Immaculate Conception and suggests that people will soon come up with a different story — ‘ they’ll say God f***** [ the Virgin Mary] in the ear’.
This is presumably meant to raise a reaction, but on Wednesday night no one stirred a muscle.
The only thing going for this show is Adam Godley’s interesting central performance as Paul, an intellectual who questions everything except his own faith. Mr Brenton is clearly fascinated by the figure of Paul, acclaiming his ability to adhere unblinkingly to a faith. Old Leftists such as Mr Brenton are often drawn to this sort of single-minded loyalty.
What the play lacks — and desperately needs if it is ever to command an audience’s belief — is a shading of humanity. Paul might talk of ‘love’ but I couldn’t feel a glow of true love anywhere in this beetle-browed affair.
Jesus himself, as portrayed by Pearce Quigley, seems a forgettable, floaty figure. He is no more likely to have inspired such a great faith than Mr Godley’s physically undistinguished, emotionally stunted Paul. Mr Godley took the role only after Paul Rhys withdrew with a fit of the vapours. Maybe the National should have taken that as an omen. Instead it persevered and the result is a holy mess.
VERSIONS of these reviews appeared in earlier editions.