Theatre review: Holy Shit

After a couple of years closed for major redevelopment the Tricycle Theatre has reopened with a controversial (for reasons that elude me) rebranding. Kiln is, admittedly, quite a hard word to say if you've got a cold, but I don't know that I'd call that reason enough to have protests in the street on press night, which actually happened because people... I don't know, needed a reason to get out of the house? Why have a certain group of old white men taken offence at everything this theatre's done ever since an Asian woman took over as Artistic Director, WE MAY NEVER KNOW. Slightly-awkward-to-say venue names aside, I liked the redesign of the building, which keeps the basic structure of the old Tricycle but with a bit more café space, and toilets you're not instantly convinced you'll get murdered in. The auditorium also keeps the same structure (including the old proscenium arch visible in the background) but with more comfortable seating and what looks like decent sightlines (though quite a few rows near the front of the stalls now seem to require looking quite far up to the stage.)

The first show Indhu Rubasingham has put on the new stage reflects the venue's multicultural remit by having cultures clash: Alexis Zegerman's dark comedy Holy Shit is about faith schools.

In particular it's about parents who know a school associated with a particular church is the best in the area, and are willing to pretend to be more devout than they are to assure their child gets a place. Simone (Dorothea Myer-Bennett) and Juliet (Claire Goose) have been best friends since university, and now both have 4-year-old daughters. Simone and her husband Sam (Daniel Lapaine) are Jewish by birth, atheists by belief, but they see forty Sundays a year at High Church of England services as a reasonable sacrifice to get their daughter into the CofE school down the road from them.

Juliet is similarly preoccupied with getting her own child into the school so doesn't object, until Simone starts talking about actually converting just so she can impress the priest; as someone who, while not devout, has some faith herself, she sees this as crossing a line. The play shifts gear when the two little girls appear to make bigoted comments to each other and the four parents start fighting their corners, determined to show they can't have passed that language down to their children.

The play does degenerate into a series of arguments, pitting the quartet (completed by Daon Broni as Juliet's husband Nick) against each other in different combinations, in a way that does get quite tiring to watch. Zegerman also throws a bit too much at the story - the way all four parents use ways they've been disadvantaged in the past to justify their own prejudices is an interesting theme, but this theme and the opportunistic attitude to faith end up getting in each other's way and stopping either from feeling fully explored. There's plenty that's entertaining, a slick productive on Robert Jones' set, whose sliding panels slot various locations satisfyingly into place, but for all the issues touched on the play ends up feeling a bit lacking in substance, a curiously low-key relaunch.

Holy Shit by Alexis Zegerman is booking until the 6th of October at the Kiln Theatre (formerly the Tricycle.)

Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Mark Douet.