Love the Sinner
Cottesloe, until 10 July
Ditch
Old Vic Tunnels, Waterloo Approach Road, until 26 June
Bickering vicars at the National. A new play by Drew Pautz invites us to consider whether the Church should ordain gay clergypersons. It’s a paradox that an organisation run by men in skirts is so vexed by the prospect of admitting homosexuals to their club. Pautz’s play neatly dramatises this contradiction in the person of Mike, a Protestant lay volunteer, who has a fling with a rent boy while attending a conference in Africa. The rent boy follows Mike home, claims sanctuary in his local church and compels him to help with his asylum claim.
These complications lead to a weighty final scene, which wants to be a psychological tour de force, a grand ethico-political religious skirmish involving Mike, the blackmailer, a top bishop and a Church spin-master. But the themes prove overpowering for the writer and everything falls to pieces in his hands. He can’t resist indulging his preference for mischievous comedy over theological argument and the big finale lacks any coherence or point.
The show’s best moments arrive earlier and involve a first-class dust-up between Mike and his broody wife Shelly, who has only the faintest inklings about his sexuality. Shelly, pushing 40 and keen to start pushing a pram, feels her last chance of raising a family is ebbing away. Meanwhile, Mike has been valiantly trying to clobber his gayness with extra helpings of Bible study. Fundamentalist fervour has pushed him towards the intolerant end of the Protestant spectrum, where his self-loathing expresses itself bizarrely, but believably, as a disapproval of IVF. At the same time, squirrels have invaded the couple’s loft and the fate of the furry ones becomes a proxy for the conflict over baby-making.
It’s a rich and sophisticated encounter made hilarious by the performance of Charlotte Randle, a wonderful and neglected actress who can touch the extremes of anger and of comedy in the same instant. She’s quite a talent and her amusing warmth is a valuable counterpoint to Jonathan Cullen’s earnest, stubborn Mike. As the rent boy, Fiston Barek has just the right measure of spirited guile and Ian Redford puts on a great show of spineless munificence as a beardy cleric cunningly attired to resemble Rowan Williams. This is a strange, confused, overambitious play. Sometimes it’s boring as hell, sometimes screamingly funny.
If you leave the National and wander over to Waterloo you can buy a ticket for a train heading south. (You’ll see in a second why I’m taking you on this detour.) The whistle blows and the engine pulls off a little later than scheduled past the windswept concrete thought-experiments that line the Thames at Lambeth. And you’ll notice that you and your dawdling express are about 25 feet up in the air. So what’s underneath?
Until last week I never gave it a moment’s thought but it turns out that the embankment connecting Waterloo with Vauxhall isn’t a solid barrow of earth but a mega-warren of vaults, crypts and cavernous arcades. One of these has become a temporary theatre. The entrance to Tunnel 228 (the number gives some indication of the scale of these structures) is tucked away behind The Cut, and as you cross the threshold and peer into its gloomy recesses the cold, stale air envelops you. Disease oozes from the pores of the crumbling brickwork and you can almost feel the ambitious microbes burrowing greedily into the filaments of your lungs. It’s a superbly creepy space and it would be an ideal setting for the wintry masterpieces of Shakespeare’s mature years.
But instead of Hamlet or Macbeth we get a debut play by Beth Steel entitled Ditch. When writers don’t know where to start they often choose the end of the world. And almost invariably plays with this theme make one wonder if the world’s demise could possibly be as painful as any dramatised version of it. Ditch opens with some bad news. Britain has drowned. The good news is that a few powerful swimmers have breaststroked it to safety on a Cumberland hillside and here they totter about the place talking their fair share of tosh and boiling vegetables. One character, a blarneying Irish drudge with the amusing name of Mrs Peel, does nothing but hack the skins off potatoes all day long. She’s the most striking character in the play, I’m afraid, which is notable for its lack of a decent narrative and its intriguingly artful lighting effects. The venue is a great discovery, though, and I can’t wait to don my goggles and mask for a return trip. Lear here would be a treat.
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