Religion remains a surprisingly popular subject for plays. It’s partly because there’s already a core of theatricality there, in the rituals, the dressing-up and the little shibboleths of piety. In one way or another, religion involves performing. And religion plays the role of Hogwarts in Harry Potter — an enclosed world, a game with rules. We know how a priest is meant to behave, so we can more quickly engage with a story about his or her struggles. Also, of course, big issues of moral principle and human frailty are close to the surface.
But does theatre treat this subject with respect? Or does it tend to sneer at religion, to reinforce a largely secular audience’s prejudices? In our culture, mockery is pretty likely to outweigh respect: witness all the second-rate stand-ups who unite the crowd with some religion-knocking. So maybe religion is a victim of its dramaticism: it’s a favoured subject that is likely to receive a bit of a bashing.
My musings were sparked by a play called Hand to God: it was a surprise hit on Broadway and now it’s at London’s Vaudeville Theatre. It’s set in a little Texan church at which there’s a ‘puppet ministry’: in the first scene a woman and some teenagers are making sock puppets, with which to instruct and delight the congregation. Things get out of hand, so to speak, when one of the teens, the woman’s son, begins to express his psychological issues through his puppet. He is goaded by his puppet for being a mummy’s boy. It’s his bad angel, his knitted Nietzsche, telling him to be strong, to defy his mother, to emulate his sexually confident friend. It takes over, possesses him, in scenes that are mainly farcical — and then, with a grating gear-change, suddenly disturbing.
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