Review: Doubt: A Parable at Dundee Rep

John Patrick Shanley’s 2004 stage play Doubt: A Parable opened off-Broadway and ended up winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and a Tony Award for Best Play.

What is it?

It’s a play with a big reputation and legacy, from Shanley’s own 2008 film adaptation starring Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Viola Davis, to last year’s Broadway revival with Live Schreiber and Amy Ryan.

Here Joanna Bowman directs Dundee Rep Theatre’s version, which keeps the American backdrop of the original – a Bronx religious school in 1964, where the relationship between a young male priest and a boy in his care is called into question.

Come for:

The chance to see a modern classic on a Scottish stage; although if you’d like a recommendation from outside theatre, Shanley also won an Academy Award for writing the 1987 Cher and Nicolas Cage film Moonstruck.

You know you’re in for a high standard all round at Dundee Rep, and the performances are predictably powerful.

Cast from Doubt: A Parable. Image: Dundee Rep.

Ann Louise Ross is especially commanding in the central role of Sister Aloysius, a character who flips the role of strict and widely-feared religious disciplinarian – all of which she is – to reveal an innate morality which causes her to not let go when she smells wrongdoing.

Stay for:

The way the play manages to be a contemplative, ecclesiastical piece about the meaning of faith and a tense and utterly involving thriller all at once.

All the time we’re given mixed signals about who to root for – Sister Aloysius seems stuffy and inflexible, while the accused priest Father Flynn is played with easy-going, youthful warmth by Michael Dylan.

Cast of Doubt: A Parable. Image: Dundee Rep.

Emma Tracey’s apprentice Sister James, meanwhile, represents a more open, less disciplinarian form of teaching, but does seeing the good make her blind and naïve

Jessica Worrall’s impressive set is also a character in itself, a vaulted, concrete-effect sepulchre with a panel which reveals the changing seasons outside.

Avoid if:

You don’t like hearing fake American accents in the theatre.

Although the reason for maintaining time and setting becomes clear when we discover the boy in question, Donald Muller, is the only black child at the school.

Mercy Ojelade cameos as his complex mother, who’s prepared to turn a blind eye because she believes education is his only escape to a better life, and in an already powerful play her single scene is a tour de force.