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What think ye of Judas Iscariot?
THE LAST DAYS OF JUDAS ISCARIOT
Almeida Theatre
WE certainly have come a long way since 1943.
Then, the BBC solemnly announced that the distinguished crime fiction writer Dorothy L Sayers had written a serial for Children’s Hour – The Man Born to be King: A Life of Jesus. For the first time an actor would speak Christ’s lines. Up until then, excessive reverence had denied him a voice.
Robert Speight’s Christ had the tone and solemnity of the Archbishop of Canterbury pontificating on a state occasion. The nation was awe-struck.
Fifty years later, Christian fundamentalists tried to storm the BBC television studio to stop Jerry Springer: The Opera. “Blasphemy and sacrilege!” they cried.
There was, alas, no protest outside the Almeida, where profanity is aplenty and the Lord and his betrayer share a homo-erotic moment. This over-long but curiously intense account of a judicial review into Judas’s ultimate destination takes place in a town called Hope, halfway between purgatory and heaven.
That high-achiever Rupert Gould, of Headlong Productions, has set the court in what seems to be the middle of the Los Angeles freeway.
Noise, crashing music, rap, bebop and raucous everyday language rise above the din.
Author Stephen Adly Guirgis does have a point to make, for beneath all this lie serious and challenging questions. Did Judas just fulfil an irrevocable destiny set for him? It seems free will was not a choice. How can his despair and remorse be reconciled with the idea of a merciful and forgiving God?
The biblical characters appear before an irascible judge and two folksy jurors. The witnesses enter through the audience and for the most part ham it up, grabbing laughs.
The Devil comes up through a trapdoor as in pantomime, but this one is dressed by the most expensive couturiers in Milan. He is sinister, charming, violent and terrifying in Douglas Henshall’s hands. Freud and Mother Theresa do a couple of cameo turns and are cross-examined. Snappy Irish-American lawyer Susan Lynch swoops to Judas’s defence while Mark Lockyer prosecutes – more “Loadsamoney” than stern voice of truth.
Judas (Joseph Mawle), tormented by his terrible deed, lights an explosive fuse of self-destruction. His physical rejection of Jesus is the realisation of a man who, in the words of Caiaphas, has “crossed the line”.
Gawn Granger is superb as the figure of religious intolerance, for he is the man who really betrayed Jesus on grounds of political expediency. It gives a rash course in justifiable hypocrisy.
On the same evening, Tony Blair was launching his “Foundation of Faith”; God knows what he would have made of St Augustine’s mother, St Monica, telling Mary Magdalene that what St Augustine, father of the Church, loved most was “banging whores and sipping wine”.
At the end, only Jesus seems bewildered and unfulfilled.
Until May 10 020 7359 4404 |
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