I can forgive him his trespasses, but flawed vicar is too flippant
The Southbury Child (Festival Theatre, Chichester)
Verdict: Facetious but touching ★★★✩✩
WHO wouldn’t want to see The Crown’s Alex Jennings playing a small-town vicar? With his kind, patrician face, he looks heaven sent for the role of the Reverend David Highland. Yet in
Stephen Beresford’s amusing, and eventually sad new play, we are also meant to imagine his Devonshire pastor as a troubled boozer and a sexual philanderer.
His even bigger problem, though, is the mother of a dead child who wants to have Disney balloons at her daughter’s funeral. She longs to celebrate her daughter’s short life; he feels death needs to be looked directly in the eye.
Either way, I couldn’t believe such a benign old stick would choose to take Custer’s Last Stand on an issue like this. Inevitably, his hard line turns the community against him — but it also struck me as too far out of character to be credible.
Beresford has been much feted since his Chekhovian drama The Last Of The Haussmans was staged at the National Theatre in 2012. Had he revealed a higher- stakes personal dilemma lurking behind Highland’s decision, or offered a more in-depth examination of the unhappy vicar’s conscience, it might have worked.
Instead, his Alan Bennettish dialogue lets David off the hook, with oodles of very English irony and witticisms that defuse the tension (Bennett, by contrast, has always been wary of such overtly emotional material).
Jennings matches spiritual unease with flashes of anguish, despite reaching too often for a cheap Scotch or a wry remark. In particular, he rues his failure to observe the first rule of ecclesiastical law: ‘Don’t f*** the flock.’
Phoebe Nicholls has the patience of a saint as his wife, somehow holding the household together; while Jo Herbert, as his sexually frustrated teacher daughter, dutifully picks up the slack in his parish responsibilities.
It’s left to David’s adopted daughter (Racheal Ofori) — a black, militant atheist — to be more facetious, though at times (such as her gag about how she has the dress sense of a Lithuanian hooker) she sounds like an authorial voice.
Jack Greenlees, as the gay, pin-up
curate, ticks the remaining boxes of church and sexual politics. The locals are chiefly represented by Josh Finan, as the cheerful thicko brother of the deceased child.
Amusingly, he is wont to ask deep, existential questions; yet he’s also given to nasty troublemaking, for which he’s never held to account.
Thanks to one of his pranks in the second half, Beresford’s plot veers away from what should be the powerful story of the titular child. Indeed, Sarah Twomey as that child’s mother, who should be the play’s moral and emotional conscience, is reduced to an awkwardly poignant side show.
Despite these flaws, there’s much to enjoy in this vision of a rural community, with its annual festival blessing the town’s river for safety and fecundity ( echoes of Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem).
Sir Nicholas Hytner’s breezy production skips over the underlying pain. And Mark Thompson’s set of a flagstone vicarage kitchen with a Norman church rearing up beyond is a great comfort to the eye.
But with fewer gags and a less facetious tone, it could have been a better play: capturing the very real pain of a Church and country which — as Beresford has spotted — are in the throes of extremely uncomfortable changes.
■ FROM July 1, after its run in Chichester, The Southbury Child will move to The Bridge Theatre in London SE1. For more reviews, visit Mail Online.