Corpus Christi at the Maidment Studio

By PETER CALDER

No protesters assembled at the theatre door, warning patrons to abandon hope for their immortal souls. That's encouraging, since the New York production of this play, which reimagines Christ and the disciples as a band of gay men, was the target of bomb threats.

But if those who opposed it as an unforgivable blasphemy (one letter reproduced in the programme described it, sight unseen, as a "fearful and terrible deception") had taken the risk of attending, they would have seen a piece which is tenderly, even naively reverential.

Certainly a sprinkle of four-letter words and some frantic sex (heard offstage rather than seen) would test the tolerance of those who regard homosexuality as either a sin or a disease.

But the idea of the human Christ as a man of human appetites is not innovatively transgressive - it informed Martin Scorsese's deeply felt 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ, for example.

And, though I'm no theologian, it seems to me that anyone who imagines a charismatic religious leader who changed the course of history would have died a virgin simply doesn't get out enough.

In any event, the Christian story is robust enough to withstand scrutiny from a variety of angles and this play - by the prolific author of Kiss of the Spider Woman, Master Class and the rambunctiously heterosexual Frankie and Johnnie in the Clair de Lune - has plenty to say to audiences in a world which still, apparently, wrestles with the idea that God might love all his children.

That said, and considered simply as a piece of theatre, Corpus Christi, which has Jesus as Joshua, born in the 1950s in the Texas city of the title, has a dated feel to it.

The cast members, plainly united by their passion for the project, deliver performances which are, for the most part, driven by more enthusiasm than craft and some are plain clunky.

The deliberate anachronism, the constant collisions between ancient and modern, poetic and vernacular, are often more jarring than illuminating, and much of the stagecraft recalls the improvisatory style of 1970s guerrilla theatre.

Yet it's often funny, never less than interesting and, in exploring the pain the Bible's Christ plainly endured in coming to terms with his humanity, touching, illuminating, even spiritual.

For those who believe, as Joshua pronounces, that "all men are divine", that can be no bad thing.