THE LAST CONFESSION
Chichester Festival Theatre
Opened 8 May, 2007
***
Débutant playwright Roger Crane is a New York lawyer, and his
work shows a lawyer's intellectual acuity and eye for forensic detail.
At various moments it approaches the best of several different
television or movie genres. There are precise, piercing scenes of power
politicking in a rarefied corporate atmosphere, cf. many recent law series. There
is a process of detection following a suspicious death, cf. police "procedurals". There is
a tribunal scene that, despite its informality, is prime courtroom
drama. But somehow it's all quite different when the main characters –
all of them male – are wearing red frocks and guarded by what looks
like a gigantic mint humbug. For they are Roman Catholic cardinals, the
humbug is a Swiss Guard, and the principal events in question are the
election, brief papacy and death after 33 days in office of Pope John
Paul I in 1978.
Ecclesiastical trappings are scarcely more absurd than any other
uniform, but when such established genre conventions are played out in
unaccustomed costume like this, a faint air of bizarre parody gathers
about the proceedings. It is not helped by occasional moments which are
wildly overplayed in David Jones' production, such as when David
Suchet's Vatican kingmaker Cardinal Benelli appends to a request to
pray for the departed Pope, "...and pray for the Church!" Cue some of the
most portentous basso profundo chords
that Dominic Muldowney has ever scored. Suchet is of course a masterly,
authoritative actor, but sometimes his performance makes up in
authority what the script lacks, and now and again you can see the gap.
His Benelli opposes the dodgy doings of the Vatican Bank (see Calvi,
Roberto), trying first to check matters through his favoured papal
candidate Albino Luciani – Richard O'Callaghan superbly cast, in pure Shoes Of The Fisherman mode – then
attempting to get to the bottom of Luciani's sudden death and finally
bidding for the papacy for himself. Lines chime out regularly
beginning, "It's all about..." [power/faith/etc] or "The Church's
business is..." [God/man/religion/souls/etc]. It is an intelligent play
about ethics at the interstices of the temporal and spiritual worlds,
and about a moment in history (evidently thoroughly researched by
Crane) which still requires explanation. It's just a pity about the red
frocks.
Written for the Financial
Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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