Theatre reviews: Doubt: A Parable | Nun of Your Business

Joanna Bowman’s new production of John Patrick Shanley’s 2005 play Doubt is both timely and profound, writes Joyce McMillan

Doubt: A Parable, Dundee Rep ★★★★

Nun of Your Business, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★

It’s a strange week for Scottish theatre to be offering two shows focussed on the Catholic Church, its rights, wrongs and follies. After decades of rowdy and robust criticism of the church - not least for its abject historic failure to deal adequately with priests guilty of sexual abuse - the late Pope Francis seemed at last to be a leader who represented the best of the church; and the outpouring of grief at his death makes it difficult, this week, to take a simply dismissive view of one of the world’s most venerable institutions.

Emma Tracey (Sister James) and Ann Louise Ross (Sister Aloysius) in the Dundee Rep production of Doubt: A Parable | Mihaela Bodlovic

The danger of complete certainty, though, is exactly what John Patrick Shanley’s powerful 2005 play Doubt is about; and in Joanna Bowman’s superb Dundee Rep production, it seems both timely and profound. The story - told in a single sweep of 90 minutes, across half a dozen scenes - involves a charismatic young priest, Father Flynn, working in a working-class New York parish with a school attached.

The principal of the school is Sister Aloysius, a hard-bitten old nun who knows the male-dominated hierarchy of the church all too well; and her character and attitudes are explored in a series of dialogues with a young, idealistic teaching nun, Sister James, who finds it difficult to adopt the suspicious and hyper-vigilant attitudes Sister Aloysius demands.

So when Sister Aloysius tells Sister James that she is certain - despite very slender evidence - that Father Flynn is pursuing an improper relationship with the one of the boys at the school, both Sister James and the audience are plunged into doubt. Nor does the play ever bring us any huge, cathartic resolution; at the end, even the rock-hard Sister Aloysius is left uncertain about whether her actions have been for the best.

Doubt is a complex, inconclusive and yet satisfying modern drama, in other words; and it receives a flawlessly intense production from Bowman’s Dundee Rep company, led by a magnificently flinty Ann Louise Ross as Sister Aloysius, and a wonderfully complicated and convincing Michael Dylan as Father Flynn, with fine support from Emma Tracey as Sister James, and a powerful Mercy Ojelade as the mother of the boy. Jessica Worrall’s austere set shifts quietly but powerfully between towering, chapel-like interior and brief interludes in the rectory garden. And like all good drama, Doubt leaves us with few answers; yet brings us together in considering a profound range of questions about how we punish wrongdoing and protect victims, while still leaving space for doubt, for understanding, and even for forgiveness.

Laura Lovemore and Lee Harris in Nun of Your Business | Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

This week’s Play, Pie and Pint drama, Nun of Your Business, by contrast, is a show that might have been designed to be undermined by the fact that its run coincides with this week of mourning. An unsubtle small-scale farce by James Peake, set in the tatty gift shop of a struggling Glasgow church called Saint Boaby’s On The Knob, it had to be stripped at short notice of its ruder jokes about the church hierarchy, leaving an already feeble comic situation more or less hopelessly weakened.

The story involves the church’s money-grubbing Mammy Superior, played with a desperate intensity by Pauline Goldsmith, trying to boost the parish fortunes by impressing a visiting prelate from Rome with a new miracle-working relic she claims to have discovered.

Add in a handsome local cat-burglar in nun drag, a benign but dim-witted young nun - played in fine comic style by Laura Lovemore - who turns out to have Christ-like qualities, and a dead prelate in the sacristy, and you have a play that could only have survived this week by combining a serious satirical intention with some brilliant comic writing; best, perhaps, just to note that Nun of Your Business had neither of those assets, and to move on.

Doubt is at Dundee Rep until 10 May; Nun of Your Business is at Oran Mor, Glasgow, until 26 April.