Close encounters | 4 June 2015

In October 2011 anti-capitalist vagrants built an open-air squat outside St Paul’s within shrieking distance of London’s financial heart. The City thrummed all night with the dob-dob-dob of bongo recitals while the rebels held angry debates beneath their plastic canopies and declared the Square Mile knee-deep in ordure. To press the point they used nearby alleys for their ablutions. This half-forgotten protest has become a play in which the central figure, the dean, has to choose between evicting and accommodating his crusty tenants. Conscience informs him that the noisy campers are Christ’s spiritual heirs. But temporal responsibility obliges him to heed his Square Mile parishioners and sweep the ragamuffins from the City’s doorstep.

The play is abstract, subtle, wordy, highly cerebral. Simon Russell Beale applies all his zestful intelligence to the role of the tortured dean but he seems to know that the emotional ingredients will never heat up beyond Gas Mark three. This doesn’t matter. Sophisticated understatement is the artistic goal here. The real star of the show is the culture of the Anglican elite, its rhetoric, its gossipy erudition, its furtive vanity, its sly habits of mockery and humiliation. We’re led into this half-hidden world and shown all its clutter and wrinkles by an expert writer, Steve Waters, who sets about his task of ironic dissection with palpable delight. The only false note is the ‘comedy secretary’, a geeky bombshell with a Twitter account who can’t adapt to the donnish mood of the dean’s office. She feels like a refugee from a sitcom.

Two real-life eminences are portrayed. The Canon Chancellor is based on Giles Fraser, a harmless but relentless natterjack, who quit the cathedral in a storm of publicity when he learned that the bivouacking limpets were about to be dislodged by force.