Theatre: A dubious success

Doubt is missing the old-fashioned acting that the play needs but it is still a success, says Colin Murphy

Ninety minutes into John Patrick Shanley's play Doubt, there is a quick scene during which some key facts are imparted, then the lead actress says, "Oh, I have such doubts," and the lights fade, and it's over. The cast take their bow, the audience applauds, modestly and the house lights come on. And then there's a pause. The audience look at each other, make to get up, sit down again. The play is obviously over, but so suddenly, so simply... And then the conversations start.

This is not a particularly good play in key respects (dialogue, depth of character, historical authenticity, theatrical artifice and imagination) and this Abbey production is straightforward, verging on bland. Yet its effect is intriguing. This was best described by John Patrick Shanley in an interview here last week: "The last act of the play occurs after the play is over, when people talk about it."

There is nothing original in Shanley's insight – though it has been neglected on stage, to his benefit, and it has proved extremely lucrative to him to rediscover it. It's a banal observation that the moral conventions of much drama mirror the court case: either a hero (unjustly accused) fighting oppression and triumphing against great odds, or a flawed character being confronted with his crimes. The most gripping court cases are those in which we can never know exactly what happened, and in which there are credible reasons for believing in both the guilt and innocence of the accused.

This is the essence of Doubt – not the question of child abuse, which is nominally its subject, but the impossibility of certainty and the consequent fallibility of justice. Shanley has taken a simple, and provocative, scenario: a nun (Brid Brennan) suspects the parish priest (Aidan Kelly) of abusing a boy in her school. Though his play indicates the priest is likely guilty, he leaves enough room for doubt that this becomes the first, and most consuming, question after the play: did the priest do it?

Then there's the next layer of doubt: if he did, is he evil or is there redeemable good in him? And was the nun correct to handle it the way she did or did she make the situation worse? Shanley exploits every speech to introduce a further subject for questioning, from theology, to educational practice, to positive discrimination and racial politics, to homosexuality and intolerance. The play creaks under the strain of all this, but by the time you're outside and arguing about it, that hardly matters.

Remarkable, also, is how Shanley has created a hit with so little. His three main characters are from the chapter on clergy in the Book of Stock Characters (two of them are familiar from The Sound of Music). They meet on stage in static scenes in one of two locations, the office or the garden. The priest has a couple of sermons, delivered to the audience. Only one of the characters makes any substantial reference to her past; for the rest, what they say is dictated not by any "integrity" of their characters so much as by the demands of the simple plot and by the playwright's objective of confounding any rush to judgement by the audience.

The performances are solid, though they, and Gerard Stembridge's direction, seem to lack the assurance that (paradoxically) the play requires: it demands big, old-fashioned acting, and there is a sense that the cast have not found that yet. But even without this, the play succeeds: it raises doubts, and that's fun.