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.
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