David Suchet investigating skulduggery in the Vatican: how easily The Last Confession could have become an unholy hybrid of Poirot and The Da Vinci Code.
Happily, this intelligent and provocative new work from first time playwright - and full-time New York lawyer - Roger Crane quickly banishes all thoughts of Belgian supersleuths and self-flagellating monks.
Instead it offers up a fascinating, unsettling illustration of the dilemma that confronts all religious hierarchies: how can one reconcile a power struggle with a life lived in God's service?
The nub of all this, the Christieesque body in the study, is John Paul I, whose 1978 papacy ended in his death after just 33 days, giving rise to frenzied speculations about murder. The power-broking Cardinal Benelli is our guide through a satisfyingly complex, fast-moving sequence of events.
David Jones's stylish production, all susurrations and horse-trading in the corridors of power, steps confidently over Crane's considerable initial name-dropping to develop a thrilling sense of both momentum and foreboding.
William Dudley's spot-on design, with its iron grills, stone arches and fragments of fresco, is redolent of time-honoured majesty and age-old secrets. This set provides welcome distraction-during the pedestrian trudge that is the botched internal enquiry into John Paul's death, the one scene where Crane mislays his sparkle.
Richard O'Callaghan is impressive as the kind, unworldly John Paul, but the evening belongs, unsurprisingly, to Suchet, who displays a rare and wonderful fluidity and naturalness. His Benelli slips from being the Holy See's all- purpose Jiminy Cricket, a peripatetic pricker of overfed egos and undernourished consciences, into something far more troubling.
At the end, he's a man with a profound crisis of faith who nonetheless still hankers after the top job. The West End should surely ready itself for an imminent Papal audience.
Until 19 May. Information: 01243 781312, www.cft.org.uk.
The Last Confession
Chichester Festival
