Radio review - Drama

Published Monday 6 October 2008 at 13:30 by Moira Petty

Like leaves on the line or finding a missing item the minute you buy another, blind faith is one of those intractable mysteries immune to reason or analysis. It’s also pretty difficult to portray except by contrast to its polar opposite. When the setting for these gradations of unbelief is the Vatican City, as in Roger Crane’s The Last Confession, adapted by Martin Jenkins, things become interesting.

Only 33 intrigue-filled days into his papacy, John Paul I was found sitting up in bed after suffering a fatal heart attack. Those who think he was murdered say this was an unlikely posture for a man stricken by coronary pains. No autopsy was carried out and the Vatican issued a series of contradictory statements. In fact, autopsies are not traditionally carried out on popes and the clumsiness of the Vatican reaction could be attributed to communal shock.

The play began in the heated cauldron of the election of a new pope in 1978, after the death of Paul VI, the incumbent for the previous 15 years. It was a bit like the American elections but without levity or women or the press pack. Political, moral and fiscal ideologies clashed. Peter Marinker’s hard-edged Chicago-born Cardinal Marcinkus, the Pope’s banker - for whom an arrest warrant was later issued but never carried out as he remained within the sanctuary of the Vatican - represented the materialism of a church entangled with corrupt financiers and the Mafia.

David Suchet was the questioning presence at the centre of the drama as Cardinal Benelli, the friend and confidant of the liberal man who was about to become Pope John Paul II. A compromise candidate, John Paul II (Richard O’Callaghan) was not only progressive, he was a man of the people, who eschewed the grand trappings of his office and made moral points through simple fables.

If there was sometimes a touch of the Da Vinci Code about this, it is only to be expected - although its conclusion was that the Pope’s heart attack had been triggered by a deliberate policy of overworking him to prevent him getting on with his reforms. The play’s achievement was to give a sense of his unclouded belief in God pitted against Benelli’s agonised doubts - even, ironically as Benelli considered running for Pope.

It was fascinating then, to listen to Michelene Wandor’s play, Tulips in Winter, which fleshed out the life of the 17th-century philosopher Spinoza. He was excommunicated from Judaism by rabbis in Amsterdam after his rationalist philosophy led him to the conclusion that there is no such thing as the immortal soul and that God is made in the imagination - but no less powerful a force for good.

Ben Meyjes played the plucky precursor to contemporary biblical criticism as a man every bit as humble as John Paul II. Wandor gave his play substance and energy by imagining that Rembrandt - a stylish cameo by Timothy Spall - was an acquaintance and that Cromwell had sent his diplomat George Downing (John McAndrew) to recruit Spinoza as a spy. Wandor even managed a potted history of Spinoza’s mathematically formulated arguments.

Just as TV is remaking The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, which caught the zeitgeist 30 years ago, its creator, the fine comic novelist David Nobbs, has come up with another piece which does the same for our times. Silent Nights starred Jonathan Coy as a man driven to excessive means to achieve silence in a noisy, rage-prone world. The play was as poignant as it was deeply funny.

DETAILS

The Last Confession - R4, Saturday, October 4

Tulips In Winter - R3, Sunday, October 5

Silent Nights - R4, Monday, September 22