Hallelujah for a cast that’s Heaven sent
HOW proudly should we proclaim our Christian heritage? In Sir David Hare’s 1990 play Racing Demon, that question is asked by Church of England vicars who agonise over their faith and how hard they should force the Gospel down the throats of indifferent parishioners.
A niche issue in 2017 Britain? Not if you consider how our country is currently anguishing about the cultural threat of militant Islam.
Priests are rich figures for a dramatist. Dog collars and ecclesiastical robes have an immediate stage impact; the clergy are also analytical bystanders, eloquent and gripped by moral questions.
David Haig’s Rev Lionel Espy is ‘ team leader’ (one of those terms that encapsulates the wetness of middle-of-the-road Anglicanism) in a parish in South London. His faith is discreet and he prefers to make sermons about Nineties political issues rather than about God and death and spiritualism.
Two of his colleagues (excellently played by Sam Alexander and Ian Gelder, who has done this part before) warm to Espy’s subtle ministerial approach, but young curate Tony ( Paapa Essiedu) is outraged. He aches for a more burning evangelism and he finds an ally in an intemperate bishop (Anthony Calf) who wants to sack Espy.
A few plotlines — about female priests and a Sunday newspaper seeking gay vicar scandals — feel dated. But there is still a laugh for a line that the thread linking Church and state has been as thin as dental floss ‘ever since we failed to confer on the Falklands conflict the status of a holy war’.
THE tension between modernising handwringers and pulpitbashers in the C of E remains as acute today as it was 27 years ago.
There is more interest today in prayer book traditionalism and in cathedral worship, but it is rather comforting to see how little the Church has changed in three decades.
Jonathan Church’s respectful, coolly- staged production is a cerebral, delicate delight from Alpha to Omega. Lovely acting from all concerned, including Rebecca Night, Amanda Root and William Chubb.
FOR a more commercial evening you could head for the London Palladium’s The Wind In The Willows musical, but I’m afraid I found it bland and unmemorable. It has little of the elegant humour of Kenneth Grahame’s novel about Mole and Ratty and Badger and the vainglorious Toad.
The show is perfectly efficient in terms of anthropomorphicised woodland creatures singing saccharine songs about sticking up for your friends. The props and stage effects do the business (Toad’s numerous toys are well done), and I liked a song in which a family of hedgehogs complained about the difficulty of crossing a road these days.
But much of the rest of it feels formulaic. Different animals are given different British regional accents. The songs by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe go in one ear and out the other. Rachel Kavanaugh’s direction turns rather silly and in-yer-face when the weasels occupy Toad Hall.
Gary Wilmot makes a dignified Badger, but Simon Lipkin’s Rat felt more like a pantomime Buttons and Rufus Hound is pretty awful as Mr Toad. You need to do more to convey a character than merely pulling your mouth to one side and fnarr-fnarring under a green moustache.
Maybe Mr Hound was too busy agitating for Jeremy Corbyn during the rehearsals period to concentrate on finding some pathos and likeability in silly old Toad.