For a small off West End theatre, the Tricycle has a truly fabulous reputation. But I’d never understood what the fuss was about. Yes, there’s a lovely bar and cafe, and yes, the art gallery is great and the cinema shows interesting films. But the theatre had never grabbed me.
Possibly I was seeing the wrong plays. The last play I saw there, Moonlight and Magnolias, was not a good advertisement. It certainly didn’t convince me the accolades from the likes of Emma Thompson (framed in the foyer) were true. Static staging, bad American accents, and a cheesy ‘tell me the point again, I didn’t get it the first six times’ script didn’t draw me in.
I began to think that like most of its neighbours on grotty Kilburn High Road (off licences, dirty pubs, second rate chain stores, multiple late opening chicken shops), the Tricycle really wasn’t worth travelling across London for.
So it was with some hesitation I watched the opening scene of Doubt: A Parable, at the Tricycle. But I was quickly proved wrong. Pádraic Delaney, playing the Priest, gave a sincere opening sermon monologue which set a high standard. The rest of the play didn’t disappoint, with the small cast – Nikki Amuka-Bird, Dearbhla Molloy and Marcella Plunkett – rising to the challenge.
Doubt is, as the name suggests, a play about uncertainty. Set in a Catholic School in 1964, it follows a nun who is wrestling with suspicions she has over the behaviour of one of the priests. To say any more would be to ruin a marvellous, tightly woven story.
It’s the kind of play that has you thinking hard. The ideas are complex, and yet handled with clever subtlety. The themes of the play accumulate, and snowball into one huge but perfectly constructed moral question mark.
Staged straight through, without an interval, it was one and half hours of pure theatrical joy. The acting was strong, even if the mother superior fumbled a few lines. And the script, by John Patrick Shanley, who also wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for Moonstruck, was flawless.
Doubt ran for 2 years on Broadway and in 2005 won a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for Best New Play. The Tricycle has a reputation for staging plays that go on to run in the West End, like The 39 Steps. Doubt: A Parable is hopefully no exception.
Doubt has finished its run at the Tricycle, but now showing is prize winning playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Let There Be Love, which runs until 16 February 2008. And watch out for plays from the Bloomberg sponsored Tricycle’s Writers Group, and the much talked about Tribunal Plays.
