Naima Khan finds Love The Sinner to be a crisis of overambitious scope rather than religious belief.
Love the Sinner at the National Theatre isn't a play about homosexuality or Christianity. Instead writer Drew Pautz presents a meandering story of one man's struggle with religious ambiguity in an ever-changing, increasingly technical world that expects a modern man to change with the times. Like a monster truck in a poor man's derby, it begins a heavyweight vehicle for drama but wanders through a plain arena before driving itself up an ill-placed ramp in an attempt at a climactic event.
The stage is set for a heated debate by sequestered western Church leaders and their African counterparts on the Church's policy on homosexuality. For those with an interest in the subject (and why else would you go see the play? Just because it's at the National? Never.) Pautz has scripted an engaging but hardly thrilling discussion by cleverly characteristic clergymen raising interesting issues about global organised religion.
As the insightful African church leader Paul, the brilliantly cast Louis Mahoney provides a litany of amusing and effectually limited metaphors. Pautz is wise to acknowledge the limitations of a playwright and attempts no conclusion, understandably ending the debates without any agreement or compromise.
The play picks up at the post-coital discussions between British volunteer, Michael, and Joseph, a hotel porter. Michael is due to leave for England and Joseph wants to go with him. Jonathan Cullen's excellent turn as the nervous Michael, still learning so much about himself into his forties is what keeps the audience attuned and brings us back after the interval. As Joseph, Fiston Barek provides much of the drama with his desperate, well-articulated need for escape, but his eagerness and exuberant youth take away from the weight of his arguments, and irritatingly, his generic African accent is hit and miss.
Back in England with his broody wife in his plush house Michael continues relations with his regular church group, and dabbles in the more “happy clappy” church events, much to his wife's unreasoned distress. This disastrously unconvincing performance from Charlotte Randle who chooses to play Michael's wife as a self-centred thirty-nine year old with a biological clock in overdrive pushes the play into predictable ground. It's impossible to sympathise with this stereotype who makes Cullen's character appear to be a sappy and willing victim, when he's not frustratingly trying to explain his moral hesitation over trying IVF.
Pautz has done well to explore some grey areas of religion and the Church's PR issues but he has been overambitious in his scope. Love The Sinner deals well with the differing perceptions of religion in Africa and the West but stumbles into discussions of persecution, asylum seeking and the modern family.
Cut the unsightly, fumbled almost sex scene between Michael and his square wife, chew the thematic fat away, and we might get a series of interesting issues surrounding organised religion, thrown up for consideration. But not this time.
Love the Sinner at National Theatre runs until 17th June
Photo Credit: Keith Pattison
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