Mary's Gospel at the Herald Theatre

By PETER CALDER

The programmes hadn't arrived by the end of the premiere performance of this new play, whose publicity material bills it as a "theatrical, poetic work about the daily labour of love".

So we had no chance to read any director's note for what is a remorselessly downbeat and oddly old-fashioned (this last word is not intended as a compliment) piece of drama.

The writer, Geraldine Brophy, the author of the excellent Viagra Monologues and most widely known as Shortland Street's Moira Crombie, described herself in these pages on Wednesday as "a theatrical terrorist", which is obscure to say the least..

"I like to look at things from another perspective," she elaborated, suggesting she might have meant she was an iconoclast and we might have hoped she would be doing something fresh.

Faint hope. What we have is the dark and fraught story of a woman, Mary (Catherine Wilkin), her long-estranged and grown-up child, Christie (Taane Mete), who has just died, and her windbag cousin Lizzie (Brophy herself), who is ostensibly Mary's caregiver but is doing a pretty fine job of being her tormentor.

You hardly need to know that Christie's absent father was a carpenter called Joseph to appreciate the rather heavy-handed symbolism. But the piece's intention remains utterly murky.

Brophy has expressed the high-minded hope that the play will stimulate debate about "how we care for our mentally ill" but it unfolds quite devoid of anything resembling a social context.

Rather it's a clammy and rather hackneyed chamber piece which seeks to illuminate Mary's pretty dodgy emotional state by employing three theatrical modes in tandem.

Brophy's Lizzie, a refugee from kitchen-sink melodrama, dominates mile-a-minute exchanges with Mary which are full of lines far cheaper and cruder than she probably intended. Mary lapses without warning into dense and discursive poetic monologues which vary from the obscure to the banal.

Meanwhile the silent wraith-like Christie (Mete) drapes and disports himself on three large upstage crosses, occasionally descending to move through the action.

The transitions are jarring. Mete is a statuesque but he seems to have wandered in from another show altogether. When he's working we stop listening to what's being said.

Brophy gives herself the best lines and devours them greedily, but her braying delivery makes Lizzie a buffoon and when she seeks to command our sympathy it's too late.

Ross Joblin's design makes the best of the Herald's frighteningly shallow stage and his house without walls neatly correlates to Mary's fragile emotional state. But the remarkably depressing whole could scarcely be described as innovative or even particularly interesting.