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The Last Days of Judas Iscariot

Published Friday 4 April 2008 at 11:10 by Ben Dowell

Stephen Adly Guirgis’ boldly imaginative take on the story of Christ’s betrayer doesn’t go in for safeguarding taboos. The author of Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train, a smash in Edinburgh in 2003, here takes a similarly loud, modern and unabashedly urban approach to the biblical story, turning first century Palestine into the screechy subways and cracked pavements of New York.

His St Monica is a streetwise kerb crawler and Jesus’ disciples are an angry crew of disaffected hoodies in a strange spiritual netherworld, a scenario you have to embrace fully if you’re not to find this three hours of theatre shockingly infantile or offensive.

But when you do, it opens up a strikingly fresh perspective on the story of Judas, still loved by Christ but here a man suffering in catatonic silence, confined to eternity until he is tried in a kind of celestial courtroom that has all the depressingly modern showbiz trappings of real life cases (as well as the fearsomely able legal representation) involving a Michael Jackson or an O J Simpson.

Perhaps even more bizarrely, Sigmund Freud joins Mother Theresa on the witness stand (before the psychoanalyst is mocked as cokehead). But the best turn of all comes from Douglas Henshall’s searingly articulate smoothie-chops Satan who reduces Iscariot’s sharp tongued attorney (Sudan Lynch) to tears, and offers a beguilingly different account of his own fall from grace.

But the highlight of this show, however, is not in the loud set pieces, but in the tender moments of insight, where the theological story is told in unadorned and human terms.

Particularly involving and affecting was the finale with Judas (played by Joseph Mawle, last seen as Jesus in the BBC’s The Passion), Jesus and a jury member brought in from purgatory.

As a whole it’s a bold conceit, and while it’s all over the place and could do with some serious pruning, the moments of humanity enable it to somehow work. Somehow.

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