Drew Pautz has written a clever, witty and poignant play which evokes superb performances from its cast. It is almost symphonic in structure, a series of movements appearing to be distinct though linked episodes at first, but which turn out to have a deep underlying coherence, both as story and theme.
      It is a play is about negotiation, guilt, the unforgiving nature of institutional commitments when set alongside human fragility – or, merely, human diversity. It is a timely play, about a divided church, a divided humanity, a divided marriage, and a divided individual. It is, though in a curious way marginally, about religion and its saccharine but futile certainties, relieved only by the paradox of other-worldly humanity (paradox or oxymoron: call it what you will). One sees resemblances to actual controversies and individuals in the current unhappy situation of the Anglican communion, at odds with itself over homosexuality, its largest portion – the evangelical, almost fundamentalist, African wing – pulling centrifugally away form the liberal, gay-admitting, American Episcopalian wing. In the play a grey-bearded other-worldly archbishop – no prizes for guessing – struggles to hold the emphatically divergent forces together, both at the institutional and the individual level.
      The pivot of the play is the relationship between a married English Christian small-business owner, Michael, and an African waiter, Joseph, with whom he has a sexual encounter while volunteering at a church conference in the latter’s country. The demands of the waiter, potentiated by all the power of victimhood, and Michael’s guilt, create an unbearable situation that threatens Michael’s marriage (his wife is attempting to get pregnant, and elects IVF treatment) and the church itself; which happens when Joseph arrives in England as an asylum seeker, the whipping scars on his back - his punishment for being gay - not being enough to protect him from deportation.
      Tension and danger abound: but wit too – it is a very funny play, as well as a profoundly sad one. Our sympathies focus more and more on Michael, whose feeble Christianity and timid homosexuality and ineffectiveness as a husband should make us scorn him; whereas Joseph, whom we should sympathise with, we come less and less to like, strident and uncompromising in his demand to have everything put right for him.
      This is theatre as it should be: the human, the topical, the absurd and the tragic, interwoven with the artistry of a Gobelin tapestry, riveting the audience from the first moments, and leaving them an enormous amount to think about afterwards.
      All the cast are excellent, but Fiston Barek as Joseph and especially Jonathan Cullen as Michael are brilliant. With taut directing by Matthew Dunster and clever design by Anna Fleischle the whole adds up to National Theatre at its best. Admiration for the cast, and admiration for the clever writing and organisation of the play, contend throughout: both win.
AC Grayling