Any play that gave Jeremy Irons a career is surely damned for evermore. Given that we don't even get ex-Boyzone singer Stephen Gately, who left this touring revival of John-Michael Tebelak and Stephen Schwartz's 1971 God-bothering musical for "contractual reasons", any chance of lightning striking twice is slim.
The pre-Christmas rush seems to have caused commercial theatre-land to go mad in its eagerness to offload every turkey in the shop. Paul Kerryson's naff-looking production is as far removed from the play's not quite counter-cultural roots at La Mama and The Roundhouse as you can get. The stripey-jumpered post-1960s flower-power whimsy captured in the sweet but hopelessly dated 1973 film version at least pursued a simplistic line of philosophical inquiry. Like a water-into-wine reversal, however, here the disciples have morphed into a troupe of 21st-century X Factor rejects desperate to show how versatile they are.
The parables are duly reeled out in a succession of sit-com silly voices and painfully shoehorned-in Glasgow gags.
Any Hallelujahs in the show's easy-on-the-eye briskness come via a dusted-down Bacharachesque Day By Day. All Good Gifts, on the other hand, sounds peculiarly and not unappealingly reminiscent of The Wicker Man soundtrack.
One shouldn't expect miracles, though, from a show that can't yet muster a full set of disciples, and, with a saviour looking like a particularly angelic rent boy upstaged by a butch Judas in black leather waistcoat, this is school-assembly stuff.
By the time the crucifixion comes round you're feeling the pain for all the wrong reasons. If anyone is saved here in a show unlikely to rise again, it's Stephen Gately. Small mercies indeed.
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