It has been quite some while since I
saw a show that teetered so crazily on the knife-edge between smart
reinvention and crass absurdity. Stephen Adly Guirgis set out to
present the various issues around the death of Judas in modern
colloquial American... often street talk (at one point a distinctly
hip-hoppy Saint Monica compares the disciple’s bad-boy zeal to Tupac
Shakur), and certainly expletive-peppered. Fine. It’s also
understandable that the most accommodating dramatic genre for such an
examination would be a courtroom drama, so we are presented with a
supposed appeal hearing (though in effect a retrial) in Purgatory, with
testifying parties including Mother Teresa, Freud, Pilate and Satan.
Guirgis knows that the genre is something of a cliché, and both
indulges and subverts it; so Susan Lynch’s defence counsel is
constantly giving the audience significant looks as if we were the jury
she was playing to, in contrast with Mark Lockyer’s prosecutor who is
one of the lunatic characters Lockyer so excels at, constantly using
his loquacious oiliness to try to cover his procedural incompetence.
Director Rupert Goold, who has previously staged imaginatively radical
versions of
Paradise Lost and
Doctor Faustus, has been
naturally drawn to a play such as this which doesn’t just sail close to
the wind of risibility but repeatedly tacks across it. One problem is
that Guirgis, although clearly intelligently engaged with a whole
barrowload of topics ranging from the historical revisionism of the
scriptures to theological matters of free will, cannot always dress up
the information he needs to convey, and so amid the bizarrerie come
moments of plonking earnestness such as when defence counsel puts it to
the hoodie Simon the Zealot, “Judas sought to create God in his own
image, God the angry avenger”, or the opening words of Jesus of
Nazareth (often present in flashbacks or sidelights but only uttering
his first lines two and three-quarter hours into the proceedings),
“Right now I am in Fallujah, I am in Darfur…”. The more earnest Guirgis
grows – first with an indictment from Satan, then with a Jesus/Judas
confrontation which inexplicably shades into an autobiographical
closing monologue from the foreman of the jury – the more the wind goes
out of the play’s sails, and it becomes apparent that however gaudily
painted the vessel or rollicking the journey, there is no identifiable
destination.
Written for the Financial
Times.