The pitfalls of absolute faith

Elizabeth Hawthorne plays Sister Aloysius, who is on a sacred mission in the challenging Doubt.

When actor Elizabeth Hawthorne and Auckland Theatre Company director Colin McColl get on to the subject of Doubt, a drama by American writer John Patrick Shanley, some big issues come up in the conversation.

George W. Bush and the dangers of rigid beliefs, paedophilia within the church, priest-busting nuns, committing a sin to prevent a sin, blind faith in a hierarchy that turns out to be corrupt.

In the play, Hawthorne plays the stern Sister Aloysius, principal of a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964.

She has her gimlet eye on the younger Father Flynn, whom she believes is committing some sort of offence against the only black pupil in the school.

She manipulates the naive young Sister James into assisting with her covert investigation. For nuns to bring down paedophile priests, they must evade the hierarchy, which protects the priests. And any shadow of doubt, according to Aloysius, must not be allowed to cloud one's stance of severe judgment.

As McColl and Hawthorne point out, Shanley uses the specific issue of paedophilia - still as contentious today as it was in the 1960s - to explore wider issues.

"The play is not about paedophilia," says Hawthorne. "It is a device, in my opinion, to reveal how institutions that are not rigorously questioned, where you get absolute dogmatic autocracy, breed an illness and allow for corruption and moral slipperiness."

Says McColl, "Shanley is using the abuse in the sense of a corruption within a hierarchy because it is timely, the idea of paedophilia - I think he is asking us to look at it as a parable."

McColl says that although the play is only 90 minutes, the rehearsals have been stretching on for hours because the cast - which also includes Latham Gaines, Goretti Chadwick and Kate Prior - keep debating its meanings.

"The last act," he notes, "is the one where the audience leaves in furious debate, chewing it over. There are so many connections, and depth charges."

The Bush administration is pertinent to the debate - Shanley has also discussed this in American media - because of its rigid adherence to good versus evil, right versus wrong, the "we will not be swayed" mindset.

"I keep saying to the actors, which one is Bush?" says McColl. "Is Sister Aloysius Bush because she is absolutely certain? Or is the priest Bush?

"We started the play thinking that doubt was the opposite of faith because in the Catholic church, if you doubt, that is a sin.

"But now we are convinced that certainty is the opposite of faith - ergo George Bush. If you are so rigid that you can't accommodate thinking, then you don't really have faith."

Hawthorne agrees: "Absolute faith incarcerates you. There are plenty of examples of that in the world at the moment. And Sister Aloysius is unswayable, a juggernaut. She is on a mission and she will not be swayed."

Sister Aloysius, in her 60s, is clinging to Victorian values in 1964, a time of huge social upheaval and change in the United States.

Kennedy has been killed, the Vietnam War is escalating, race riots are fanning across the country.

Yet Aloysius is alarmed by the emergence of ballpoint pens in the classroom.

"She is maintaining structure," observes Hawthorne drily. "She is trying to maintain vigilance and guardianship in this shaking time."

"The terrible thing," adds McColl, "is that at the end she realises that it's all to no purpose in this hierarchy. She has put her faith and trust on slippery ground."

* What: Doubt, by John Patrick Shanley

* Where and when: Maidment Theatre, Mar 16-Apr 8