Doubt: A wintry Maxine Peake compels in this twisting parable about unsubstantiated accusations

Telegraph

14-02-2025

'Doubt' and 'Maxine Peake' are not words I'd normally put together – the actress is such a strict socialist she once described Labour voters who couldn't bring themselves to vote for Jeremy Corbyn as 'Tory as far as I'm concerned'. But perhaps there's something self-reflective at play in her choice of project at Bath.
John Patrick Shanley's oft-revived Tony-winning 2004 play proffers neat testament to the perils of self-certainty. Drawing on the author's own experience, it's set in 1964 in a Catholic church school in the Bronx, a fortress against the era's liberation presided over by nuns whose vigilance about sinfulness is a repressive constant.
In Lindsay Posner's compact, deft revival, Peake takes the leading role (played in the 2008 film by Meryl Streep) of Sister Aloysius, the principal whose beady eye misses nothing but whose focus is so exacting it permits no grey areas, and thus is apt to overlook the messy complexity of human behaviour. The actress is well-suited to the icy rigour of the character, her face glaring out from under a mourning-black bonnet, every inch of her at once burning with zeal and shiver-making winter made flesh.
Her office almost an interrogation cell, she quizzes first a recent addition to the 'Sisters of Charity' order, an altogether too sunnily disposed teacher called Sister James (a sweetly demure Holly Godliman), taking her to task for her lapses of forgiving liberalism. The main object of her sedentary admonishments and gradually declared suspicions, though, is lonely Father Flynn whose sermon on the value of doubt amid the flux of faith we've heard at the start. What we haven't been shown, though, are the interactions between Flynn and a troubled black altar boy that have had Aloysius quivering with alarm.
The piece is composed with a twisting mixture of tightening noose and saving slack – just who are we really to believe? Ben Daniels' vigorously animated Flynn is rattled by insinuations that turn into accusations; is he affirming his innocence or confirming his guilt? For all her hermetic nature might his tormentor have the measure of a predator, even if only a potential one? We're in a world rather reminiscent of The Crucible – in which moral hysteria collides with personal failings, everything also bound up with severe social constraints.
The neatness, though, is as much a curse as a blessing; we mainly wait, like meek pupils, for the next partial revelation. Though matters boil bitterly to a head, our emotional investment remains quite limited; who to root for, who to feel moved by? Yes, the play catches the crushing prejudices of the era, and speaks, too, to the cancel-culture of today. Yet it doesn't feel wholly like a modern classic. The plot, as such, thickens with the arrival of the boy's mother (Rachel John, a picture of dignity and contained hurt) – ushering in a valuable note of reproving compromise and compassion. But at the abrupt end of 90 minutes, there's a faint tang of thin gruel.