Friday 16 February 1990

CURATE'S EGG

Paul Anderson, review of Racing Demon by David Hare (National, Cottesloe), Tribune, 16 February 1990

The state of the Church of England, torn apart by faction fighting as its congregations dwindle, might seem a strange subject for a playwright of the left.

But that is what David Hare explores, with mixed results, in his latest play. The focus of Racing Demon is a four-priest team in a poor part of south London. The senior priest, the Reverend Lionel Espy (Oliver Ford Davies), is a sceptical liberal who preaches against government policy to a congregation that includes a cabinet minister. The conservative Bishop of Southwark (Richard Pasco) wants him sacked, but is opposed by two of Lionel's colleagues, the Reverend Donald "Streaky" Bacon (David Bamber as a cycle-clipped, bespectacled eccentric) and the Reverend Harry Henderson (Michael Bryant as a dignified, Cambridge-educated closet homosexual). The fourth member of the team, the Reverend Tony Ferris (Adam Kotz) turns against Lionel after being "born again" as an evangelical fundamentalist.

Lionel's fate is sealed after Southwark's number two, the Bishop of Kingston (Malcolm Sinclair), reneges on a long-standing promise that his job is secure. Finally, to cap everything, Harry's homosexuality is exposed in a Sunday newspaper and he resigns his post.

The polite civil war in the C of E, with Anglo-Catholic conservatives forging an unlikely affiance with evangelical fundamentalists against liberals and theological revisionists, is well observed: the sense of an institution in terminal decline is inescapable.

Hare's writing is witty, the acting excellent,and Richard Eyre's direction supremely competent But Hare never really makes the case for taking his protagonists' predicaments seriously. If you don't already care what happens to the Church of England, Racing Demon won't change your mind: you'll find it, as I did, rather akin to an elegantly structured and executed dispute about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.