Chat show from hell

Just to save time, let me tell you which bit of Jerry Springer - The Opera was meant to get the likes of me, qua Catholic, all worked up.

It was the bit where Springer, the vulgarest American chat show host on the circuit, does a version of his confessional show in Hell.

And, on behalf of Satan, dressed in a dapper scarlet suit, he quizzes Jesus about whether he owes other people an apology - Adam and Eve for being cast out of Eden, the Devil for his loss of status, his old mum for deserting her.

His old mum? That's right. The Virgin Mary gets a talking part here, bawling at her son for leaving her to fend for herself. "Where were you when the children died?" she cries. "Where were you when I was crucified?" he retorts for rhyme's sake. Well, at the foot of the Cross actually. But let's not quibble.

The reference to the Virgin as being "raped by an angel" is in poor taste. As indeed, is the appearance of God the Father as a kind of glorified Elvis Presley, asking Jerry Springer to hold his hand, because he's tired of people blaming him for their bad choices.

But then bad taste is precisely the point of the production, the first offering by the new National Theatre director, Nicholas Hytner, at the Lyttleton. It's a sassy, amusing, clever take on the contemporary confessional telly culture, epitomised in Jerry Springer, whose show is, to all intents and purposes, a freak show.

This is not a review of the opera - the production is still in preview - but it's giving nothing away to say that this is blasphemy used as an aid to social satire.

The Christ who appears in the second half is a reappearance by the man who in act one confesses to his girlfriend that he wanted to act out his baby fetish by getting her to change his diapers. When he reappears as Christ, his nappy has been modified to a loincloth.

As for the Virgin Mary, she appeared earlier as the mother of a frustrated fatty who wanted to be a lapdancer. God is recognisably the same guy who earlier two-times his girlfriend for a transvestite - a chick with a dick, as the chorus puts it. Anyway, you get the picture.

As the audience is warned at the start of the diabolic chat show: "This may not be suitable for viewers without a knowledge of Jewish-Christian mythology".