Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Theatre: James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner is dazzlingly funny. Kim Cattrall is a revelation in a monstrous role

Good and bad at the National. The Amen Corner by James Baldwin is a wryly observed comedy drama written for a studio theatre. It’s an excellent small play. The director Rufus Norris pumps it full of steroids and tries to turn it into a great American epic like Streetcar or The Crucible. His staging suggests the finale of a country-house opera festival. Costly baggage impedes the script’s sprightly flow. On-stage jazzmen snivel through trombones and hack at double basses. Preening choirs warble and sway. Spare actors hang out of windows trying to look cool and indolent. The running time reaches a Napoleonic 155 minutes. Megalomania infects the furniture too. Baldwin asked for two cheap sets, a ramshackle kitchen and a dingy meeting-room. When designers approach the slums they generally go for a) the junk-shop ram-raid, or b) the stylish junk-shop ram-raid. Here we have c) the artless heap of cluttered grubbiness done on a Götterdämmerung budget. Surrounding the pile of crummy garbage looms a great henge of faded neoclassical façades, which look scruffy, oversized and confusing. What happened there? Superman ripped a few chunks out of New York and threw them at Nicholas Hytner. And missed. And yet, through the encrustations of ugliness and bombast, many virtues shine.

The play examines the hypocrisy of human beings and their institutions. Sister Margaret, a charismatic female preacher, is facing accusations of embezzlement from enemies within her evangelical church. At home, her teenage son wants to swap God for the worldly delights of boogie-woogie, sex and dope. Her errant husband, a fading jazz star, has returned to make amends for his long absence.

Margaret and her congregation are steeped in biblical lore. They address each other with courtly titles, ‘Sister’, ‘Brother’, ‘Mother’, ‘Daughter’, and they use ‘Praise the Lord’ as an everyday greeting.

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