Jesus in Streatham

On The Third Day
*

Practising masochists, interested in experiencing the oppressive boredom and angry bewilderment that a chronically inept piece of theatre can induce, should rush to savour Kate Betts' On The Third Day. They will have a satisfyingly bad time while they watch this ridiculous, religiously slanted contemporary melodrama - a sort of dramatising of a nervous breakdown or a nightmare, with a modern-day reincarnation of Jesus soothingly on hand.

The play is weighed down by incestuous longings, hallucinations and lashings of repetitive angst about death and forbidden sex. It is drenched in sorrow, jumps confusingly from dream to vision, from realism to symbolism, until you cannot quite tell where you are or why.

Viewers of Channel Four's The Play's The Thing series will already know that the TV programme features a competition and a struggle to select a play from submissions made by two thousand first-time dramatists, with the accolade of a West End production guaranteed to just one. On The Third Day miraculously turns out to be the lucky winner, chosen by producer Sonia Friedman, whose brain-child the contest was, literary agent Mel Kenyon and actor Neil Pearson.

The author, Kate Betts, who has an MA in creative writing and lectures at Chichester University, brings together a desperate woman and Jesus Christ, who turns up in a Streatham pub.

Maxine Peake's touchingly distraught, 30-year-old Claire, eager to abandon her virgin status, invites Jesus back to her flat. There she switches on Holst's Planets, makes a pass at him and begs that he go to bed with her. Christians will be reassured that Jesus behaves like a perfect gentleman, shows compassion and keeps his distance.

Director Robert Delamere and designer Mark Thomson, who variously turns the stage into planetarium, apartment and sea-shore, cannot rescue the play from its hectic, almost comic preposterousness, or do anything about its shifts from one theatrical plane to another.

The heights of absurdity are scaled when Jesus goes potholing with Robbie (Tom McKay), for whose self-harming sister Claire he does have the hots, or at least the quite-warms. Similarly the climactic scene when Jesus holds a dinner party to reunite Claire, who may already be dead, and Robbie, who is alive, and Elvis Presley, who sings for no reason, opts for the inscrutably surreal. Peake's intense, neurotically powered performance and Paul Hilton's cool one are the evening's only consolations.

If On The Third Day was the best play the judges could discover then I conclude they were sent out of their distinguished minds through having to read too many plays, or that they looked for new playwrights in all the wrong places.

Certainly Friedman's aim was brave, worthwhile and imaginative: to encourage untested playwrights and bring new plays to the West End, where they are in increasingly short reply, thanks to rising costs and the eagerness of some owners to pack theatres with musicals at the expense of straight drama.

Betts can write natural-sounding dialogue but on this evidence she does not know how to put a play together. In competitive spirit I bet Friedman £250 that even I would be able to write a more interesting and amusing drama than the pretentious, obscure load of nonsense she has inflicted upon us.