Love the Sinner

This is a fluent, engaging play about the relation between faith and life; is faith the foundation of a life or a bandage on it? This is worked out at the personal level through Michael, who is a Church volunteer who has a sexual encounter with a young African man while working for a delegation in Africa. He attempts to smooth over the contradictions between his private homosexuality and barely-manageable public heterosexuality by lurching further into evangelical Christianity which displeases his wife, his colleagues, and, it seems, the Church. Through him, the play’s asking whether faith guides us in how to act or whether it is a means of personal self-oppression.

On the geo-political level, the play begins with related questions being asked at a meeting of a delegation, trying to draft a statement on homosexuality on behalf of the worldwide Anglican communion that can satisfy both the liberals in the American church and the traditionalists in the African church. The scene asks whether any faith can possibly smooth over these fundamental contradictions of belief.

It’s a good topical issue. I’m not sure what the play is saying, precisely, because there are some lurches of character development that left me a bit confused. Michael initially seemed fairly practised at anonymous sexual encounters though he was so quickly rattled that I presumed this may have been a first time. He is unnerved - who wouldn’t be? - to discover that Joseph (the young African guy) has literally turned up on his doorstep but a scene later he is bringing him food and encouraging him to live in the church basement. At the end of the play, Michael has refused to go and testify with Joseph and Joseph goes up alone; why, I’m not sure.

The star of the show is the dialogue which is overlapping, interrupting, often very funny, and capturing some of the energy in these debates. He’s generated some new typography to indicate this which actually makes the page very hard to read: a welter of columned text, /, *, **, and ^. The production team seem to have figured it out though because the effect is mainly seamless. Just once or twice a choreographed uproar seems rehearsed because of the lack of any similar interventions before it.

In fact, the actual star of the show is Jonathan Cullen as Michael who I remember vividly from Robert Holman’s Rafts and Dreams at the Theatre Upstairs twenty years ago, where he was performing a similarly halting and hypernaturalistic role. (I remember thinking as I watched it that I’d never seen such naturalistic acting in my life.) Here he’s stammering, awkward, given to bursts of messianic enthusiasm, cringing postcolonial fear, and, at one memorable moment, desperately failed attempt at arousal. Fiston Barek’s Joseph is impressive too, switching in a moment between charming gracefulness and vengeful threats.

The structure of the play is 5 scenes. The first is a large ensemble scene. Scenes 2 and 3 are largely two-handers. Scene 4 is a small ensemble that becomes a two-hander. Scene five is mainly a 4-hander. The scenes are located in a conference room in a posh African hotel; a bedroom in the same hotel; Michael’s living room with his wife Shelly; an office in Michael’s workplace; and the basement of Michael’s local church. I would the events cover around six months but I’m not sure.

There are a couple of clunky bits of plotting. When Joseph comes in to deliver coffee in scene one, the delegates are told to close their eyes becomes they are supposed to be sequestered and have no contact with outsiders during their discussions. This principle is followed to the letter but not the spirit since at least two of the characters engage in fairly substantial conversation with Joseph. It seems more likely that it’s there so that the characters won’t immediately recognise him in scene 5 though that itself doesn’t really seem necessary. (Who’d necessarily recognise a hotel porter, six months later?)

It does create one of a series of telling images that centre each scene. In scene 1 it’s all the churchmen and women standing with their eyes closed; in scene 3 a Bible is thrown across a room; in scene 4 Michael attempts to have sex with Shelly on a table covered in religious printwork; in scene 5, Joseph and three churchmen sit around a nursery school table on nursery school chairs. In 1 and 5, there’s something witty about the unsuitedness of the church to the present world. In 3 & 4, it’s a clash between faith and desire.

I was intrigued to see how sympathetic Michael was. You might have thought that the atmosphere of colonialist exploitation, his being a rather fervent Christian, and a businessman, and a closeted gay man would be enough to make him a figure of derision but, helped by Cullen’s strong performance, you feel for him for the most part.