DOUBT: A
PARABLE
Tricycle
Theatre, London NW6
Opened 26 November, 2007
***
John Patrick Shanley's four-handed play, which premiered off-Broadway
in 2004, fully merits its subtitle. Not only do we hear a couple of
homiletic tales from young, charismatic Brooklyn-Irish priest Father
Flynn, but the entire 80-minute piece is, not finger-waggingly didactic
but rather a deliberately instructive illustration of that state in
which, as Shanley puts it, "the consciousness is disturbed but not yet
altered".
But for authorial skill in creating a succession of such states, this
would be a rather thin tale of "did he or didn't he interfere with one
of the altar boys?" The boy's teacher, Sister James, refuses to believe
it; the convent school principal, Sister Aloysius, is unshakable in her
pursuit of Fr Flynn as a wrong 'un. For much of its first phase it
seems to be Catholic-oppression-by-numbers, with Dearbhla Molloy's Sr
Aloysius scowling beneath her wimple and offering lapidary
pronouncements such as "Satisfaction is a vice" and even "'Frosty The
Snowman' espouses a pagan belief in magic". Meanwhile, Sr James
(Marcella Plunkett) and Fr Flynn (Pádraic Delaney – note the
Irishness of the cast) embody the spirit of Vatican II (the play is set
in 1964) by caring about their charges as human beings.
However, when Sr Aloysius enjoins the younger nun to be more observant
and less charitable, we see the first doubt enter. Sr James will always
maintain her trust in Fr Flynn, but this comes to be more a matter of
faith and will than reasoned conviction. From her, the doubt enters us,
the audience, even as we recognise how Sr Aloysius's very words are
changing the territory much as Iago's do in his central exchange with
Othello. Next, although the chain of ecclesiastical command leaves all
the cards in male hands, Fr Flynn begins to doubt the security of his
position against this campaign. (After all this, the final couple of
revelations are both unsurprising and glib.) The only person who is not
shaken is the boy's mother, who in Nikki Amuka-Bird's excellent
performance is demure yet unafraid of Sr Aloysius and unswerving in her
love for her boy regardless. Nicolas Kent's production is smooth and
unfussy, and rightly allows us the space to watch ourselves as well as
the folk onstage.
Written for the Financial
Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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