Review Doubt, A Parable

A fraught adversarial situation between nun and priest within a New York Catholic school during a time of social change fully engages Peter Barker. 

Doubt, A Parable
by John Patrick Shanley 

Truth And Consequences
http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/

Sister Aloysius Beavier is the sternly upright conservative headmistress of a New York Roman Catholic school in 1964 which has just accepted its first black pupil from the working class population of the Bronx.

Now purely circumstantial evidence leads her  to suspect a young, progressive priest with an otherwise attractive personality, Father Brendan O'Flynn, may be guilty of molesting the new boy.

John Patrick Shanley's play tackles the nature of faith in oneself as well as in others and in self-policing, hierarchical institutions.

Doubt swirls around the allegations, but Sister Aloysius, the principal of a school attached to the local Catholic Church, does not allow herself to entertain any uncertainty.

She sets out to prove his guilt, not so much Miss Marple as a Miss Wimple who has already drawn her conclusions and now is working backwards to find the proof.

She's a small but steely and tenacious figure against the taller frame of the urbane Father Flynn, marking the division between the two not only in personality but in a hierachy.

For the priest always outranks the nun and the protocols for handling discomforting complaints easily turn into a dead end process and a means of suppression.

Both a melodrama and a witty thriller mystery, writer John Patrick Shanley's 2005 play therefore pits the austere female principal, played by Stella Gonet, against Jonathan Chamber's charismatic priest.

Doubt is a four-hander play with three women and one man structured around a series of duologue scenes punctuated by monologues, among which are sermons delivered to a congregation.

It's a tense 90 minutes revealing unexpected but all-too-human complications and the atmosphere of an era - the USA's first Catholic president John F Kennedy had just been assassinated.

Even the title Doubt, A Parable has an ironic 21st century ambivalent edge - for when was a parable ever uncertain? -  as nun and priest battle it out verbally and manoeuvre on the stained glass floor under the chandelier of PJ McEvoy's ecclesiastical set design.

Directed by Ché Walker, there are terrific performances from the whole cast which also includes Clare Latham as the idealistic, enthusiastic young teacher Sister James and Jo Martin's mother of the alleged victim who has her own understandable reasons for not making waves. 

Doubt is a tautly constructed play where no character has the monopoly on probity and the Catholic Church's powerful reach brings unexpected but logical reactions when religion becomes a team game.

This is highlighted in a compelling scene between Sister Aloysius and the mother of the allegedly abused boy who, focussed on a better life for her son, is willing to accept some risk as long as the boy benefits.

However, this is a production that falls at the very last hurdle. Instead of leaving the question of the priest's guilt or innocence open, it seems to interpret a final ruse by the nun followed by the priest conceding to her as an indication there is no room for doubt.

The actors play this as a cut-and-dry situation and this ending jars, given the complexities of the situation presented beforehand. Nevertheless for everything else in a demanding, pacey and thought provoking play, it's a green light. 

Review The Dover Road

A polished production of a charming, whimsical play catches Francis Beckett's fancy and makes for a pleasurable evening, evocative of times past.

The Dover Road

by AA Milne

Before The Bear

Jermyn Street Theatre

In about 1920, two young couples, illicitly eloping, are on the road to Dover to pick up a ferry for France. One half of each couple is running away from an unhappy marriage. 

Their cars break down in suspiciously similar circumstances, and they find themselves seeking shelter in the splendid home of a monstrously rich and grotesquely self-satisfied man.  

He takes it upon himself to sort their lives out and it turns out – but no: in the unlikely event that you haven’t guessed, I won’t spoil it.

The Dover Road, written in 1921 and performed on New York's Broadway before a London production at the Theatre Royal Haymarket the following year, is a fairly predictable, light and gentle period piece. 

There’s nothing profound about it all, nothing of very great lasting significance, and it shows its age. “What’s a wife for if it isn’t to look after her husband?” asks one of the young women plaintively.

 

But if you have a soul and a sense of humour, and you care even a little about how our grandparents lived, it’s a nice evening in the theatre.  

It’s also a product of its theatrical time: Each of the characters is wealthy, two of them have titles, and most of all, the young men have no backstory; for the only backstory you could give a young man in 1920 was a hellish few years in the First World War trenches, watching his friends die like flies, feeling permanently guilty that he lived, unable to get out of his mind the horrors he has seen. 

But that was not what people went to the theatre for in 1922, and it was not what AA Milne gave them.

Take it for what it is – a gentle little comedy – and if well performed, it’s thoroughly enjoyable.  And in the tiny Jermyn Street Theatre, it is performed beautifully.

There’s a wonderful set designed by PJ McEvoy, realistic without being obtrusive, with well-judged pictures and colours. Director Nichola McAuliffe extracts every ounce of humour the script offers.  And there isn’t a weak link in the cast.

Two outstanding performances come from Patrick Ryecart as Mr Latimer, the rich man in whose house the play is set; and from Georgia Maguire as Anne, the brighter and tougher of the two young woman. Katrina Gibson does well as the other young woman, Eustasia, hampered by a script that requires her to be nurturing and clingy beyond belief.

Tom Durant-Pritchard and James Sheldon put in likeable and convincing performances as the two young men, Leonard and Nicholas respectively, and there’s a piano-playing butler, brought to marvellous and slightly sinister life by Stefan Bednarczyk, whom I last saw at the same theatre doing a one-man show ofFlanders and Swann songs.

Years later AA Milne went on to create Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh. Today few people remember that he ever did anything else, and his early plays have largely been forgotten. This one was well worth dragging out of obscurity.

 If you want theatre always to have profound significance or contemporary relevance, this isn’t for you. But if  taken on its own terms, for those who like this sort of thing, it's a good evening  and it gets a green light from a cheerful playgoer