Unless a miracle happens, this Hugh Whitemore play, which stars Derek Jacobi, closes tonight in Richmond without moving into the West End.
It is no masterpiece but it is more thought-provoking than the gilded pap you currently find in Shaftesbury Avenue and, besides, boasts a stellar performance from Jacobi. He plays a fugitive employee of the Vatican, Humphrey Biddulph, who bursts into a Tuscan holiday home occupied by two English couples. It turns out that a shady Italian dealer has given him sight of a document which suggests that Jesus Christ was simply an itinerant Jewish healer and that the Resurrection was a carefully arranged fabrication. Having shown the item rashly to a member of the Holy Office, the harrassed Humph has been banged up in a clinic from which he has made his escape. Fearing for his life, he turns for help to these sceptical Chiantishire couples.
You can easily pick holes in Whitemore's premise. The modern Vatican, you feel, would have more sophisticated ways of dealing with a subversive document than murdering or incarcerating its promoters. And while Whitemore says that he set out to create a role for Jacobi, he signally forgot to write one for anyone else: for much of the first act the holidaymakers simply sit around listening to the fugitive's story.
But a debate begins in the second act and at least Whitemore raises questions of which the modern stage generally fights shy. What, he asks, is the value of faith? Is religion the enemy of reason? Are believers just looking for a happy ending to life's disordered narrative?
The debate may be one-sided and lacking in theological intricacy but in the dumbed-down climate of commercial drama it is none the less refreshing. And Jacobi, having played a fantasy pope in Hadrian VII, gets the chance to don the mantle of a ferocious anti-papist.
Prowling round the stage in pyjamas and carpet slippers, he exudes a remarkable combination of vulnerability and rational passion. He apologises at one point for holding his hosts to ransom; yet when he inveighs against Vatican wealth, unscientific credulity or the easy invocation of religion at moments of crisis, he does so with paradoxically righteous anger. Above all, he uses his classical training to highlight the key words in a sentence: acting, I am increasingly convinced, is partly a matter of hitting the right inflexions.
It is a pity that Whitemore doesn't give him a strong opponent. But, in Anthony Page's well-paced production, David Yelland neatly embodies smug English orthodoxy, and Francesca Hunt the stirrings of moral guilt.
It also seems a comment on our times that the West End can find room for prancing penises and minor Coward but not for an enjoyable moral thriller featuring a knockdown performance from one of this country's finest actors.
Ends tonight. Box office: 020-8940 0088.
