Unholy row about God

On Religion: vain search for enlightenment
10 April 2012

For people who put their faith in philosophers rather than the divine, this "theatre essay" by director Mick Gordon and philosophy professor A C Grayling may come as a crushing, intellectual disappointment. On Religion scarcely raises crucial questions in relation to present-day arguments raging over religious fundamentalism, its impact upon world politics and the threat it poses to individual secular governments.

Instead, Gordon and Grayling consider religious faith through the prism of an English domestic drama, with Christianity breaking out in a family where Godlessness has been the norm. They articulate banal, mouldy views on the attractions of atheism and religion, as respectively delivered by a sixtysomething-Professor of Natural Science-Gemma Jones's ill-named Grace, and her half Jewish son, Elliot Levey's Tom.

This son, to his mother's horror, abandons his legal career to become a priest. His Jewish but irreligious father (Pip Donaghy) mainly remains a bystander, while the play, under Gordon's jerky production, moves oddly back and forth in time. In Britain atheists and nonfundamentalist Christians co-exist reasonably-Richard Dawkins, with whom the playwrights conversed, is no national pariah.

It might have been interesting, as drama and debate, therefore, for Grace's authoritarian form of atheism to be opposed by a fundamentalist son. Tony, however, is set to become a liberal priest.

It might even have been worthwhile to discover how Tony came to be smitten by religious longings, but Gordon/ Grayling, although or because they have consulted the likes of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, content themselves with numinous metaphors and symbols. "Love is like faith. It won't leave me alone," Tom explains. Love, in On Religion, is even regarded as a Racine-like, dangerous obsession.

Grace, who wears her atheism as if it were protective clothing to ward off tolerance of people whose faith does not depend on evidence, might have been a dramatic figure rather than Tony's predictable mocker of a mother who ludicrously asserts religious moderates encourage religious violence.

Instead of arguing, say, that religious faith has proved a destructive force for bad, she lectures. Tom's murder becomes the cue for an irrelevant clash of wills between his atheistic wife (Priyanga Burford) who wants to read Philip Larkin's poem about Churchgoing at his funeral and his mother who opposes it. Miss Jones's severely unsympathetic Grace sheds convincing tears. On Religion sheds no real light.

Until 6 January (0870 429 6883).

On Religion
Soho Theatre
Dean Street, W1D 3NE

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