In the programme of Malcolm Sutherland's adaptation of the Gore Vidal novel Live From Golgotha, Vidal bemoans the fate of books lying "full fathom five", drowned out by the march of the "cathode tube".
I don't know about the cathode tube but this dire stage version is enough to send you screaming back to the text to find out what on earth was going on. What seemed a potentially fruitful pairing for the newly refurbished Drill Hall of the great American satirist and the successful adaptor/director of Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory and Oscar Moore's PWA Diaries disappears into a fog of incomprehensibility.
Vidal's satire on religious truth, TV hegemony and history, that one can just about discern, carries a challenging, impudent irreverence much needed in these increasingly fundamentalist times. His cyber-farce in which the old biblical truths (or tapes) are being destroyed by a mysterious hacker audaciously pits two sets of dogma against each another: ancient, biblical myth and contemporary televisual rapacity. Live from Golgotha! See it now, see it on NBC. And watch the ratings soar!
So far so enticing. But Sutherland fails utterly to find any sustaining, coherent style in a production sabotaged by a catastrophic leading actor reading from a script as if in rehearsal. Hopefully he'll improve but at present any rhythm, wit and intellectual focus disappear in a welter of fluffed lines and incoherence.
Pity the rest of the cast, which includes the estimable Sylvester McCoy, Bruce Purchase and "Aliens' Lieutenant Gorman" William Hope (who supplies the one genuinely stirring moment as an aggressively messianic Christ), all of whom toil in vain to turn a poorly designed, technologically complex production into something more than dross.
In the end, it's a waste of everyone's time, not to mention the loss of a fascinating, if controversial, debate on Judaeo-Christian connections and religious and historical "might have beens". Instead, we're left with an embarrassing hodge-podge and what feels uncomfortably like anti-Semitic ravings. Not what was intended, surely.
Showing at the Drill Hall until 1 December. Box office: 020 7637 8270.
Live From Golgotha
