Chichester Festival Theatre | ★★★★★

Current affairs can make long-established plays feel like they were written yesterday. And so it is with John Patrick Shanley’s 2004 Pulitzer-winning work. Set in 1964 this revival is anchored by a superb Monica Dolan as Sister Aloysius, the principal of a Bronx Catholic school who goes toe-to-toe with Sam Spruell’s Father Brendon Flynn, the institution’s priest who she suspects is sexually abusing the children in her charge.
Just before Lia Williams’s gripping production opened former Pope Benedict was accused of turning a blind eye to these kind of crimes when he was archbishop. And it is this wall of silence, inevitably constructed by men, that Dolan’s habit-wearing nun takes on with the combativeness of a street fighter.
Nothing better illustrates the hierarchy she is up against than when she invites the likeable Flynn into her office on the pretext of planning the Christmas pageant, and he casually takes a seat behind her desk.
In the play’s crunch scene her intention is to confront him with her suspicions, nay certainty, that he is a sexual predator. But the genius of Shanley’s writing is that it balances the accuser’s conviction against the scant evidence she has at her disposal. There was, she says, that time when she saw a boy withdraw from his touch when he placed a hand on the child’s shoulder. It was enough to set alarm bells ringing, and also direct the unworldly new teacher Sister James (Jessica Rhodes) to keep an eye open for anything that may be wrong in the school, but without any hint of what it is she is looking for.
Soon after, James notices that the school’s only African American boy is unusually subdued after he has been alone with the Father Flynn in the chapel. And that the child also smells of alcohol. That propels the Shanley’s work to its deserved status as one of the finest speak-truth-to-power plays ever written.
Joanna Scotcher’s excellent design is brimful of metaphor. The backdrop is a wall (of silence?) through which shines light in the shape of a cross. Dolan is on superb form. Heart and humour seep through the opaque, austere carapace of her character and clothes. There is also terrific support from Rebecca Scroggs as the mother of the allegedly abused student. Scroggs’s meek Mrs Muller provides a stunningly unexpected layer of moral complexity when she prefers to turn a blind eye to her son’s suffering, seeing it as the lesser of all the evils faced by a poor black kid growing up in the Bronx with a violent father.
“It’s only until June,” she says, keeping her eye on the prize that will enable her her son to graduate and so escape the traps life has set him. Spruell is also terrific as Flynn, transmitting just enough guilt to allow faith in the sister’s crusade, and just enough humanity to leave us — and her — with doubt.