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Friday 9 January 2009

Weightless babblefest

Bliss
Royal Court

Peter Pan, El Musical
Garrick

The Last Days of Judas Iscariot
Almeida

Whopping disappointment at the Almeida. The Last Days of Judas Iscariot by Stephen Adly Guirgis is set in purgatory. A supernatural court must decide whether Judas’s soul will go to heaven or hell. Trouble is, we don’t care. Judas barely speaks until the final moments so it’s impossible to become involved in his fate. The onomatopoeic Adly Guirgis (say it twice and you get the noise of bath-dregs emptying) is more interested in rowdy slapstick and celebrity-baiting than in theology. Mother Teresa takes the stand (in the trial of Judas?) and she’s portrayed as a Bible-belt momma full of homely aphorisms. ‘Evbody wan say summin,’ she burbles. ‘Nobody wan listen nuddin.’ Sigmund Freud pops up and is teased for his drug-taking and his intellectual pomposity, neither of which are germane to his banal analysis of Judas. The only decent character is Satan (played as a sharky badass dude by the electrifying Douglas Henshall), whose amoral banter is witty enough. ‘How’re you feeling today?’ asks an attorney. ‘Long night,’ shrugs Satan, ‘no regrets.’ But when he returns in the second act, with muted lighting and duller repartee, he’s an anticlimax. I’m staggered that this lukewarm mishmash has been called ‘intelligent’ when the author expects his audience not to know what ‘Zealot’ and ‘Mosaic law’ mean. Occasionally Mr Prattly Gargoyles blunders into interesting territory: Christ’s redemption was generated by an act of violence and therefore Christianity is in a sense predicated upon evil. It’s a stimulating paradox and one which any decent RE teacher deals with at primary-school level. This is a dippy satirical fantasy which expresses nothing but the author’s whimsical fascination with Christian theology. Towards the end, I realised I’d seen it all before. A scatterbrained buffoon discusses the hows and whys of his faith while his audience snores. The definition of a sermon.

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