It might seem to be a series of commonplaces to say that power and beauty can lie in simplicity, that love takes many forms, that most tragedy is the result of unwittingness, mistakes, regrets and ignorance, and that the erratic spotlight of moral fashion can make victims of those who, once left in the shadows, did not always do harm. But they are also truths, and recurring truths at that: combined into a deceptively simple tale they strike one all the more poignantly for having an ineluctability about them, for one knows that the tale is a once and future tale - this has happened, and will happen again.
       An educated, cultured priest - a convert to Catholicism - whose life is one of mourning for a youth he loved in his own youth, finds himself in a very tough west Scotland parish. He befriends a lad and a lass at the school where he conducts RE lessons - he takes them on outings, puts up with their crude energies and rough, ignorant, sinful innocence - and is drawn more and more to the lad, with whom at last he spends a night - not in any carnal way, though he tried to kiss him, but in a drunken stupor side by side on the carpet of his living room, holding hands.
       There the two are found by the priest's housekeeper. She is dying of cancer, a clever and unexpectedly well-read woman who has come to rely on the priest's friendship because of the uselessness of her own husband. She is shocked; tells the police; the matter comes to court, accompanied by the disgrace of the priest. His punishment, which he accepts - indeed welcomes - is community service. There is resignation and acceptance at the end, but not contrition: the priest is not the sinner, but the sinned against.
       Ian McDiarmid writes and stars in this delicate, clever, rich production. He has an outstanding supporting cast, who play multiple roles with wonderful versatility and even more wonderful verisimilitude. They sing Scottish songs, hymns, pop music, weaving a backcloth by their means. The chief props are a table and a carpet, which come in and out in the casts' hands almost unnoticed. The thread throughout is the priest: McDiarmid is on stage without a break, he is the gentle, yearning, defeated but hopeful centre of a storm, whose strength and adherence to the human truth of himself and what has happened has nothing to do with his religion or his office in it, but something quite different: the endurance of the broken reed which must of its nature seek a wind to wave in.
AC Grayling