THEATRE

God of mercy, God of wrath

Love the Sinner

NATIONAL THEATRE (COTTESLOE)

of having an editorial line against Christianity: a residue of the staging, early in his tenure,

of Jerry Springer: the Opera and then His

Dark Materials, adapted from the novels of English Lit’s leading anti-Christian, Philip Pullman. There have also been exuberant anti-clerical sections in some of his productions of classics. Yet Hytner has also scheduled Howard Brenton’s Paul – a serious, if quizzical, play about religion – and a revival of Shaw’s St Joanand has made clear that he has frequently asked Kwame Kwei-Armah, a believer, to write a play about what it means to have faith. Kwame so far hasn’t, but Drew Pautz, a Canadian-born dramatist now based in London, has. Indeed, in its opening scene, Love the

T

Sinnerplaces more demands on that section of the National Theatre costume department containing dog collars and pectoral crosses than any play at this venue since David

record him. Grimes released his only record as leader in 1964 on the iconic ESP-Disk label run by lawyer Bernard Stollman, who tells alarming stories about him. That label, too, came back to life in 2003, but given the history it seemed unlikely that Logan would be picked up again. Eventually, the Tompkins Square label gave him studio time and after an absence from the racks of 45 years, Logan’s high, wailing sound can be heard on a CD (a technology which didn’t exist when he last made a recording), called simply The Giuseppi Logan Quintet, as if he were a newcomer. He sounds rusty, sometimes tentative and in many respects more conventional than before, but the voice is utterly distinctive, an untutored folkish cry that stands as a reminder that the avant-garde in 1960s jazz wasn’t so much an exercise in high intellectual mod- ernism as an attempt to get back to the very roots of jazz in old work tunes, field hollers and the blues. It makes for disconcerting but attractive listening, like hearing a voice from childhood, roughened by the years and experi - ence, but immediately recognisable. During the Second World War and the first great revival of traditional jazz, musicologists prowled New Orleans and the South, hoping to find that some of the founders of the music were still alive and still able to play. Something similar is happening now. Is the old busker on the corner a fallen star? Is the guy trying to pawn a battered saxophone a name from the past? Brian Morton

he National Theatre, under the direction of Sir Nicholas Hytner, has been accused

Drew Pautz’s

Love the

Sinner: a split play about a divided Church

Hare’s Racing Demon, 20 years ago. A conference of Anglican bishops from around the world has been placed in isolation in a hotel room in Africa to pray and speak together until they can agree a holding state- ment on the communion’s position on homosexuality among clergy and worship- pers. The polarities of discussion are represented

by Hannah, an American woman bishop, and Paul, an African. She preaches a God of tol- erance and forgiveness, while he upholds a deity who judges and asks his people to make hard choices: the God who demanded that Abraham be prepared to kill his son. Uneasily refereeing this theological stand-off is the senior prelate from the Church of England, a gentle, bearded intellectual called Stephen. This debate about

doubts about the legitimacy of this method. This is a dramatic situation that Ibsen might

have relished: a wife insisting that only trad - itional intercourse is valid, while her husband is secretly sleeping with a man. But, again, Pautz doesn’t really explore this, although, to his credit, he goes beyond the easy smear that all Christians are hypocrites. He has also cre- ated in Archbishop Stephen – portrayed with impeccable physical and psychological detail by Ian Redford –a very rare portrait in drama of spiritual goodness. This C of E leader may be a fudger and muddler, but he responds with impeccable generosity and warmth towards the sins with which he is presented. Fiston Barek, a young actor making his

the extent to which profound historical and intellectual dif- ferences can be suppressed in the interests of pragma- tism is the basis for a fascinating play, with relevance to both religion and other areas: spookily, as the first night took place, muted BlackBerries on theatregoers’ knees were ghosting through the news of the creation of a coalition even more unlikely than the one that holds the Anglican communion together. But on the periphery of the opening scene has been Michael, an evangelical from England who is present at the conference as an observer, and, in a decision that will surely have angered the gods of dramatic construc- tion, Pautz decides to go with the peripheries. In a play of unusual structural disunity – each of the five scenes introduces a new location and, in most cases, a major new character – the second scene finds Michael receiving sexual room service in his African hotel room from Joseph, a black waiter. Back home in England for the third scene, Michael struggles with a wife who is des- perate to have a child before it is too late. IVF is a possibility but Shelly has religious

This C of E leader may be a fudger and a muddler, but he responds with impeccable generosity and warmth

towards the sins with which he is presented

National Theatre debut, brings a subtle mix of vulnerability and cunning to Joseph, Michael’s African lover. But Jonathan Cullen, as Michael, suffers from Pautz’s inexplicable failure to write the great confrontation scenes with Joseph and the archbishop, which an Ibsen or Shaw would

clearly have given him. The problem is that the stakes are never high enough for the pro- tagonist: in a week when the American Episcopalians ordained their first lesbian bishop, it would clearly have been a better play if Michael were an English bishop rather than simply a confused congregant. The hero of the evening is the designer Anna Fleischle, who is faced with creating in rapid succession on a small stage a conference room, a bedroom, a living room, a factory and a church crypt. She achieves this with a set of interlocking boxes which fluidly move the action on, but this impressive visual solution cannot disguise the drama’s failure to unite two separate strands: public Anglican policy and Michael’s private crisis. Perhaps an uneasily split play about a dangerously divided Church was a deliberate merger of subject and structure, but the result is dramatically unsatisfying.

Mark Lawson

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