There’s too much shouty indignation to save this production of Doubt, even with Maxine Peake and Ben Daniels at Theatre Royal Bath
“Things are in the air and you leave them alone if you can”
With a ferocious central role, John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt is the type of play that attracts a certain calibre of leading lady. I’ve been lucky enough to previously catch Stella Gonet and Monica Dolan as Sister Aloysius and now it is the turn of Maxine Peake to take on the role at Theatre Royal Bath’s Ustinov Studio. Lindsay Posner’s thoroughly bleak staging makes an already tough play harder to endure though, a penance to be endured.
Set in the institutions of the Catholic Church in the 1960s, Shanley’s parable about a priest and teacher suspected of abusing a black male pupil has a strange relationship with time. Through the eyes of traditionalist nun Sister Aloysius who seizes on the accusation regardless of what evidence there may or may not be, it harks back to an older time; through the other characters, it feels more like a tipping point of a society about to change substantially; through our own eyes, with the knowledge of how the Catholic Church has historically dealt with its many cases of abuse, it hits differently still.
As the central pair going head to head, Peake’s Sister Aloysius and Ben Daniels’ Father Flynn are intriguingly opposed, espousers of significantly different forms of the same religion and increasingly locked against each other as accusations spiral into confrontations. Holly Godliman’s Sister James and Rachel John’s Mrs. Muller, the mother of the alleged victim, broaden the world of this conflict but the focus is on the duelling righteousness.
In the dark of Peter McKintosh’s inky black set, Posner’s production loses too much nuance though. There is a lot of confrontation here to be sure, but directed to so much shouty indignation lessens its impact substantially. Subtleties and layers remain unexplored among the scorching declamation, all the more frustrating given how layered we know Peake and Daniels to be as fine performers. Ultimately this a production that needs more than three Hail Marys and two Our Fathers to save it.
