So I sat with all them motherfuckers at the Almeida last night...whoops. Stephen Adly Guirgis's language is a bit infectious. This is the third play by this New York writer that's been on in London. I saw the first one in 2002, Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train, at the Donmar and was bowled away by the vitality of its language. The play, an intense four-hander without an interval, seemed to pack more high-octane oomph into a couple of lines than many modern British plays do in a whole evening. It had the amazing Ron Cephas Jones playing a condemned murderer in a tough New York jail who gets religion. This new play about a mock trial in Purgatory of Judas Iscariot for his betrayal of Jesus has many of the same elements -- a cracking use of language, a violent intensity of confrontation between the characters and a crime-and-punishment setting. It opens on a high with a heart-rending monologue by Judas's mother who has buried her son alone, but then seems to lose its way. The play has 23 parts and 15 actors, and it goes on for more than three hours. Perhaps the reason the play didn't stir me enough was my fault -- I don't lie awake at night worrying about Judas, Jesus, God and purgatory or the other big questions that preoccupy the author. What he does is stitch together a lot of non-realistic court scenes in front of a cantankerous New York judge in which a defence lawyer and a prosecutor cross-examine a range of witnesses, from Sigmund Freud to Caiaphas. This gives Douglas Henshall the chance to put on a terrific star turn as a playboy Satan, and Ron Cephas Jones the opportunity to play Pontius Pilate with equal verve as a man on his way to the golf course. But Judas himself is mainly mute, and so is Jesus. That should be the core relationship in the play, but Adly Guirgis seems to shy away from it, so the question of exactly why Judas betrays Jesus remains unanswered. Judas is well played by Joseph Mawle (recently on BBC television playing Jesus in The Passion) but apart from kneeling in a rigid catatonic stupor, tortured by remorse, he doesn't have enough to do. Jesus gets only one real scene, and the result is that the secondary characters dominate the play. The transposition of the New Testament story into modern New York argot provides a lot of laughs, possibly too many for the subject matter. The saints all wear haloes and one character wears fluffy white angel's wings. At the end there is a sharp change of tone, with a speech by the jury foreman in matter-of-fact terms about the time he was unfaithful to his wife. We all have our lapses from grace, like Judas. This downbeat coda marks a shift of gear and it's effective, but it can't quite make up for the self-indulgence of some of the earlier scenes. I'm not prejudiced against plays about religion (I loved Saint Joan, but that was written by an atheist) but this one should be cut by an hour. The acting is terrific and so is the direction by Rupert Goold and the design by Anthony Ward. The problem is that the virtuoso writing of the courtroom scenes drowns out the real story of Judas. Like many a defendant, he ends up as something of a cipher at his own trial.
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