Rooting for crime

Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train by Stephen Adly Guirgis deserves its classic status. This wordy and highly cerebral play pulls off an extraordinary feat by leading the spectator inside the mind of a psychopath. The setting is Rikers Island, where an old lag, Lucius, befriends a younger detainee, Angel, who hopes to be acquitted of killing a pastor whom he shot in the buttocks. (The bullet-in-the-bottom detail is typical of Adly Guirgis’s macabre frivolity.)

Lucius is a chain-smoking fitness freak who keeps himself in trim by jogging on the spot and performing bursts of press-ups in his cell. We first meet him as the victim of petty bullying by a sardonic prison guard and we aren’t told why he’s in custody. This clever piece of dramatic timing ensures that we’re rooting for him from the start and we’re startled to learn that he’s a murderer with eight kills to his name. His first victim, he tells us, was a pizza delivery boy whose corpse he flung in a dumpster. He expected to be charged and jailed for life. ‘But nothing happened.’ No arrest, no investigation. He even called the pizza firm to ask for his ‘missing’ order to be replaced. And it was.

To him the next step was logical, to kill again. And because we’re in sympathy with his outlook, we’re persuaded that his motives are, in part, reasonable. It’s a weird and disturbing experience to feel that one’s moral coordinates are being broken apart and reshaped in favour of random homicide. That’s the magic of the script.

Kate Hewitt’s production places the actors on a gleaming grey catwalk that stretches the length of the auditorium. Two glass partitions, gliding back and forth by remote control, indicate the cell walls.