Trying to wrangle the privilege of reviewing this play turned me, I fear, into a conniving, nasty little piece of work. (I can only hope that Leah Aspden’s Lucifer would approve.) I knew I had to see ‘Immaculate’ pretty much from as soon as I saw the marketing and Instagram account (Olivia Cho and Mariam Eapen; with further credit to Olivia Cho for her incredibly atmospheric photography, vivified with a haunting early Renaissance melancholy). I thus sidled into the Blue’s lovely theatre editor’s DMs as swiftly as I could possibly do so, slyly staking my claim.
The play—what happens in it? Mia (Laetitia Hosie), a young, candid, slightly down-on-her-luck woman, desultorily celibate for eleven months, finds herself unexpectedly serving as a second Virgin Mary (only slightly more fallen): a surrogate mother for a second Messianic birth. Commendably resigned to this puzzling state of affairs, Mia is visited by the Angel Gabriel (Isaac Wighton), leading into a brilliantly uncomfortable scene where Mia believes Gabriel to be a client (she works as a what-she-calls ‘mistress’), and Gabriel, shocked out of speech, quivers before this mortal instrument of vice and virtue—traits that are, at first, irreconcilable to Gabriel. There is later a great moment of meditation on how Christianity is having to improvise/adapt/overcome to work with yet-more-sinful sinners than ever before. Clashes between the worldly Michael (Mia’s ex-boyfriend, played by Cosimo Asvisio) and the rarefied pieties of Gabriel serve as a subtle commentary on the crisis of what it means to be an imperfect human, acted upon by temptation, sin, and evil thoughts.
The actors understand intuitively the happiest limits of satire as they sport with naturalism: very little is too stagy—the clumsy stupidity of Michael and Rebecca (Milly Deere), for example, lands always on the right side of the eye-roll—it never feels implausible. Similarly, Jo Rich, who plays the laughably awful Gary Goodman (to assemble a picture of this character you need only mentally transport yourself to a particularly grim club night: a thick smog of Lynx Africa, and the gleam of fake Rolex watches) has a masterful instinct for a carefully managed disregard of theatrical realism. Does any man actually carry himself like Gary? Does it even matter? Rich is also a thunderously energetic performer, and a brilliant dancer—and the play bends and melds to accommodate unexpected patches of physical performance.
Doubling their main roles as Lucifer, Gabriel and Rebecca is an unholy trinity of narrators (Aspden; Wighton; Deere) that punctuate the two-act play. They speak in verse, and again arrest these flashpoints in the play with dance and music, but flutter in itinerant lines of conversation and banter. It works very well: a precise theatrical unit with its own believable dynamics of vying interiority. Even in the moments of narrative expedience (i.e. explaining to the audience what’s going on, what to expect), through the narrators’ scuffling interactions with one another, we get a little look at the fissures that build the world of the play. Without being realist, the play is enough of a social commentary that it cannot exist totally abstracted from the real world of human interrelations. Between the musical narrators is all the sociability of Milton’s fallen angels, who frequently bicker amongst themselves. The dance and narratorial numbers brim with energy and absolute betrayal-of-self from the actors as they sacrifice themselves to the performance, replete with total bathos, married with a very welcome camp element.
I’m not entirely sure how to describe the theology of the play, which is ineluctably its own treatise on religion. The play rallies itself to take part in the great discourse of theological battle, then disarms itself again. On the one hand, the humour is unabashed and pursues an arrow-point of religious disquiet. As a fallen document, however, I’m not sure the play ended without a seedling of redemptive potential. I don’t know whether the play wants you to believe in Christianity or not, but just as Gabriel regularly reminds Mia of the mystery of God’s ways, and the necessity of conserving human free will and its exercise at almost all cost, I would point to this sense of intense human volition and choice as an inherent part of the play’s catechising self-questioning.
Less seriously, there was a lot of mental rest in the play, too. Speaking as a literature student, it sometimes feels quite disobedient to just watch and surrender to a piece of media. I did not feel called to analyse, but—that supreme rarity of an encounter with an excellent piece of media—to rest in its brilliance, to let it unfold unhindered. No need to pull it apart and demand what each part of the play was doing. For example, I don’t think I could give you an answer on whether the characters felt real or not. They weren’t hyperbolical and they weren’t naturalistic. They were performing dissenters, raised into moments of bathetic, exuberant heights, luxuriating in the moments of gently adjusted exaggeration, before throwing themselves again into a sardonic quip—embracing a moment where reality reappeared swooping with a heavy beat of its wings.
The play did feel part of that especially Catholic tradition of comedic self-inspection, and a kind of knowingly mortal interaction with religion, such as you might find in Father Ted or Derry Girls. I don’t know whether you’d tell a priest to watch the play, but I think you could definitely approach ‘Immaculate’ looking to find something hopeful in it.
The play is eminently well-written and joyously funny. Leah Aspden, of whose talent I had been forewarned, has a mischievous catalogue of accents and impressions that surface and throw themselves forth at various moments—a deadpan TV reporter flanking the Second Coming of Christ, a paternal if slightly creepy Scottish doctor, and a Love Island-esque commentator all forming a motley dramatis personae of incredible vocal acrobatics and ineffable quickness of observation and mimesis.
This is a play that thrilled me with its writerly brilliance—it was such a good reminder of the sheer brilliance of student drama, an epithet which is anything but pejorative. There were moments where the audience were laughing so organically for such a prolonged period of time that it felt like those joyous moments when, in a group, a joke keeps getting added to by someone else. The laughter shape-shifts, expands lily-like, and grows exponentially.
I clapped until I felt my biceps grow an inch of sinewed thickness. This play was a triumph and I very much hope it is re-run at some stage!
4.5/5!