Roslyn Packer Theatre, July 4
8.5/10
We all suffer from doubt. Even the politicians. They’ve just perfected hiding theirs behind a veneer of certainty. John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 Doubt makes most plays seem absurdly one-dimensional. It was true of Sydney Theatre Company’s 2006 staging, of Shanley’s 2008 film with Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman, and is abundantly true of this engrossing new STC production directed by Marion Potts.
It tells of Sister Aloysius (Pamela Rabe), the principal of a Bronx primary school in 1964, who suspects the local priest, Father Flynn (Sam Reid), of interfering with the lone black pupil, Donald Muller. Her suspicions are aroused by circumstantial evidence provided the boy’s teacher, Sister James (Shannen Alyce Quan), and such is her certainty that she informs Donald’s mother (Zindzi Okenyo).
Sister Aloysius makes a cross of her certainty, and nails herself to it. Flynn denies any wrongdoing, Sister James sways in the prevailing breeze, and Mrs Muller just wants her boy to survive until June, when he’ll escape to high school.
The play’s so finely balanced that any given production might place a gram more credence in Sister Aloysius’ conviction or in Flynn’s denials. Even then, audience members will leave plagued by varying levels of doubt.
Rabe’s withering performance matches anything she’s done in her rich career. It’s a phenomenally demanding role. The ruthlessly laundered and starched Sister Aloysius is part detective, suffragette, inquisitor, man-hater, shrew, grieving widow, child-protector and wit. Rabe notably highlights the latter, making the play’s first half funnier than I’ve seen it before: the barbs and witticisms crackling like dry wigs underfoot as she delivers them in that stentorian voice of hers.
Doubt demands the actor playing Flynn be a worthy foil, and Reid is that. His Flynn is boyishly young, fit, sleek and used to charming parishioners, pupils and nuns, alike. We see it at work on Sister James. Sister Aloysius is impervious because she’d made up her mind about him long before the charm could insinuate itself. What else could she deduce from his long, feminine fingernails, the three sugar-cubes in his tea and his use of a ballpoint rather than a fountain pen?
Quan is initially less convincing as Sister James, her wide-eyed ingenuousness being slightly overcooked in the early scenes, before her character’s mounting confusion sweeps that away. Okenyo rises to the challenge of making her character almost as complex and conflicted as the rest of the play in only one short scene.
Bob Cousins’ lavish set enchants as it revolves through its different scenes, before a backdrop of Bronx building tops (although the play could be staged with much less), and Jessica Dunn’s mysterious music is by turns as jittery as everyone’s nerves and as sombre as a Mass.
“Are we people of flesh and blood, or are we just ideas and convictions?”
asks Flynn towards the end. What a question for our polarised times.
Until August 2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubt:_A_Parable