BWW Reviews: LOVE THE SINNER, The National Theatre, June 16 2010

CanadIan Drew Pautz's new play, Love the Sinner, does not sound like gentle midsummer entertainment for the Londoner who has sweated all day in this still largely non-air-conditioned city - not least because there are plenty of sweaty faces and palms amongst the cast in this claustrophobic production. But though the play does not shy away from Big Questions, there's plenty of broad comedy and some biting satire on business meeting etiquette that produced wry smiles around the audience and put a metaphoric splash of Pimms in the water bottles.

Pautz asks us to consider what happens to people and institutions when they are forced out of their comfort zones. The play opens towards the end of a long and inconclusive meeting that is attempting to reconcile two wings of the Anglican Communion over the issue of gay bishops - a progressive, Western church, losing members who cannot understand why their religion isn't moving with the times and an evangelical, African church, losing members who cannot understand why their religion is so keen to move with the times. As the bishops speechify, volunteer minute-taker Michael (Jonathan Cullen (I), as perspiringly uptight as Lee Evans doing stand-up) takes an interest in an unusually articulate waiter, Joseph (Fiston Barek in an impressive debut) which later blossoms into the act of love, if not love itself. Like the African bishops, Joseph is aware of his power and, like them, he is willing to exercise it. Bearing the scars of a vicious gay-bashing, Joseph turns up at Michael's home in England forcing Michael to face the consequences of his actions and face up to the conflict between his increasingly conservative faith and his very modern problems - asylum, bisexuality, IVF and publicly professing Christianity in a secular society.

To his credit, Pautz avoids the kind of glib answers and neat tying up of loose ends that an American movie preview audience would demand, but in doing so, he makes it very hard to sympathise with any of the characters. Joseph is manipulative and bullying, Michael is weak and hypocritical, the bishops are shown as prisoners of their congregations and everyone elevates public relations above principle as the means of resolving problems. Maybe that is what life is like now, but by packing in so many of the fault-lines on which the globalised world of the 2010 splits, Pautz sells all of them a little short. Nevertheless, the National Theatre should be applauded for work like this - a new play by a young playwright unafraid to explore issues and unafraid to leave the work of finding answers to the audience.

Love the Sinner is at The Cottesloe Theatre until 10 July 2010

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