Birmingham Mail theatre review

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    THE serious allegations levelled against Catholic priests from past years have frequently hit the headlines, in recent times, and this brilliant play gives an insight into how mere suspicions can have a dreadful effect on a seemingly innocent man's career.

    Charismatic Father Flynn is trying to bring a modern approach to life at St Nicholas RC School in The Bronx, but his attempts to offer special help to the first black pupil lead to a clash with the principal, Sister Aloysius, a hard-as-nails disciplinarian.

    She is convinced there is an improper relationship between the priest and the boy pupil, who has parental problems at home, although there appears to be little evidence to support her fears.

    Claire Armstrong Mills gives a superb performance as the icy Sister Aloysius, and her exchanges with Father Flynn and the 12-year-old boy's mother, Mrs Muller, are gripping throughout.

    Robert Laird is totally convincing in the role of the tortured priest, his occasional sermons from a pulpit in a corner of the stage adding a dash of realism to the drama, while Abi Quiney, playing the young Nun school teacher Sister James, and Michelle Black (Mrs Muller) make splendid contributions.

    The play, written by John Patrick Shanley - himself expelled from two schools as a boy - is impressively directed by Paul Viles who also designed the excellent set. Produced by Rosemary Manjunath, Doubt continues to stretch the audience's judgement qualities until Saturday night (March 19).

                                                 PAUL MARSTON

   Compelling way to remove doubt

 ****

 THE one-word title bestrides John Patrick Shanley’s story of a Catholic school in New York’s Bronx and it reminds us of its presence right up to the climactic end.

 The fearsome Sister Aloysius, the school principal, has no doubt at all that Father Flynn has been behaving inappropriately with a 12-year-old black boy. 

 Father Flynn has no doubt that he is completely innocent. The young Sister James is equally positive of his innocence but hesitant to proclaim it in the face of her superior. And the boy’s mother, Mrs Muller, is simply certain that she wants her son to have a good education, whatever the circumstances.

 Something, somewhere, has to give, and it happens after we have watched the pressures mounting and when the last moments of the action arrive and make it clear that the doubt is still there. This is a fine piece of drama and it is reassuringly safe in the hands of a strong and generally confident cast.

 Most of the action takes place in the principal’s office, where a statue of the Sacred Heart stands atop a nest of two dozen pigeonholes and where Sister Aloysius is accustomed to reigning supreme and unquestioned. She has no evidence for her accusation. She doesn’t feel she needs it. She explains that she goes with certainty, not proof, and she will do what needs to be done.

 TOUGHEST OF COOKIES

 Sister Aloysius (Claire Armstrong Mills) is the toughest of cookies, whose authority and discipline are not to be cowed by the challenge from humanity and compassion, or swayed by the protestations of the unworldly Sister James (Abi Quiney). The priest has got to go, and she is not averse, as she says, to making up little things to illustrate any point she wants to make.

 The inevitable confrontation comes after the interval and it is superbly handled in Paul Viles’s compelling production, with the principal and the priest (Robert Laird) at one point doing verbal battle almost nose-to-nose across her desk.

It is Robert Laird who has opened the drama by delivering an assured sermon from his pulpit, and he builds unwaveringly on this excellent start as he seeks to stop the character assassination by holy steamroller with which he is faced.

 Claire Armstrong Mills, though prey to momentary first-night hesitation late-on, delivers a performance befitting Sister Aloysius’s block-of-ice reputation and makes the most of the occasional line that comes her way as an unexpected lightener for the general tension that she generates.

 Michelle Black, as Mrs Muller, springs a surprise with the implacable confidence with which her character responds to her summons to the principal’s office. This, and the way in which she expresses her attitude to the mounting scandal, provide an unexpected twist to an absorbing evening.

 It is left to Abi Quiney, scurrying about, head-down, to offer an air of anxious innocence against the small but turbulent world with which she is surrounded, and she achieves this quite splendidly.

 JOHN SLIM