Alma Tavern
Sister Aloysius (Amy Tanner) is a sour, middle-aged nun who disapproves of ballpoint pens and thinks Frosty The Snowman is heretical. Sister James (Alice Coles) is an innocent novice who sees no evil and inspires children with entertaining history lessons about F.D Roosevelt. Father Brendan (Connor Wulfric) is a charismatic priest who teaches basketball and wants the church to be more open and welcoming. We are (again) in an American catholic school, and it is (again) the early 1960s. You can see where the story is going once you've read the cast list.
Except it doesn't go there at all. Nasty Sister Aloysius realises that nice Father Brendan is molesting one of the altar boys. The rigid church chain of command prevents her from going through the proper channels -- if she reported her concerns to "the monsignor" it would be take out of her hands hands and he would cover it up. Nice Sister James, who raised the concerns in the first place, remains convinced that Father Brendan is innocent.
Except that it isn't that simple, either. Sister Aloysius has no real evidence for her suspicions except (I suppose) an intuition she's developed after years of working with priests and altar boys. She never liked Father Brendan because of his modernity and (we suspect) his popularity. Sister James says that the boy, Donald Muller, returned to class after a visit to the rectory (where pupils are allowed but nuns aren't) visibly upset and smelling of alcohol; Father Brendan says, when confronted, that the boy had been told off for stealing communion wine. (The movie version, incidentally, adds a detail that Brendan was also seen returning an item of underwear to the boy's locker; but since he's a PE teacher that isn't particularly damning either.) And just to add a wrinkle to the proceedings, Donald is the only black pupil in a Irish/Italian catholic community. When his mother (Corinne Walker) is brought in, she confounds stereotypes as well: she partly believes the allegation but doesn't want her son removed from the school because it would hurt his future career. And she implies that even if Brendan is an abuser, he could also be acting as a good friend to her son.
Everyone in the play accepts that male priests sometimes sexually molest young boys, which is a pretty bad indictment of the church, the teachers, and indeed, everybody involved. But the story isn't really about the child abuse scandal. It is subtitled "a parable". The first time we see Father Brendan, he's preaching a sensible, engaging, witty sermon about doubt. The trauma of the Kennedy assassination shook everyone, Catholics especially, but that despair brought them all closer together, and closer to God. (He also says, significantly, that people can experience doubt and despair because they have done bad things that no-one else knows about.) When challenged on the flimsiness of her case against Brendan, Sister Aloysius says "My certainty is proof enough." Which is presumably also what she would say if someone asked why she was Catholic.
It's an incredibly tightly composed piece. There is a substantial twist towards the end, which forces us to rethink some of what has gone before; it elicited an audible gasp from some sections of the audience. A lot of ideas are crammed into a single act. Sister James complains that all the children are terrified of Sister Aloysius, and Aloysius says that is as it should be. But when Mrs Muller remarks that her husband beat their son over the alleged wine incident, Aloysius responds "he shouldn't do that" without hesitation. Everyone accepts that the (relatively trivial) sexual abuse allegation would terminate Brendan's career if true; but no-one remotely thinks they should intervene in the (clearly much more serious) physical abuse the boy is suffering at the hands of his father. Indeed, Sister Aloysius takes it for granted that Donald, being black, will sooner or later be beaten up by the other children in the school. She is concerned that his colour will disrupt the visual symmetry of the Christmas pageant while Father Brendan takes it for granted he'll be treated the same as everyone else.
Doubt is going to replace Ghosts as my go-to example of a work which depends on unanswerable questions and unknowable information which exists outside the frame of the story. (So maybe it is about God after all.) If it has a fault, it's that it's too finely balanced: setting up a situation where both Sister Aloysius's case and Father Brendan's defence are equally plausible requires some contrivance. I found myself asking smaller (equally unanswerable) questions about the characters' off-stage lives. Will Sister Aloysius, a widower, who has seen something of the world, lose her vocation as a result of what has happened? Will Sister James, who became a nun immediately she left school, retain hers?
Four characters on the stage, fifty people crammed into the tiny auditorium. The cast are uniformly excellent; Connor Wulfric, who has appeared in your actual movies, clearly dominates, but Corrine Walker, the alleged victim's mother, in her single scene, comes fairly close to understatedly stealing the show. She also provides a Christmas carol at the beginning and the end. And fair play to the sound engineer who had to coordinate the sound of bird-song with Brendan's dialogue.
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