The Faith Machine @ The Royal Court
by Editor
A more human tale than the title suggests, Alexi Kaye Campbell’s The Faith Machine is a neat, engaging cogitation on religion, love and making a difference.
We start in the Manhattan apartment of twenty-something couple Tom and Sophie, poised on the brink of a break-up. The date is September 11, 2001.
There is an argument, a dead father, an ultimatum and the half-hearted packing of a suitcase.
The inevitable implosion of this romance is punctuated (a terrible, deafening full-stop) by the sound of a jet engine overhead and the sudden rearing up of solid concrete lines, projected on to screens flanking the stage.
It’s a powerful moment, if only because we know it’s coming.
A shame then, that the run-up is a little lack-lustre. The ingredients are there: young lovers, guilt and grief, politics and emotional blackmail. But the end product isn’t quite heady enough. The debate is too structured, too controlled.
Brit Sophie (Hayley Atwell), furious at advertising-type Tom (Kyle Soller giving good tightly-wound New Yorker) who is about to sign a morally-reprehensible drugs company as a client, rattles off a list of the corporation’s crimes. She wants him to drop the account and has been compiling case histories, newspaper clippings. Her speech spools out into a tangle of pharmaco-jargon. She clutches the file in her hands – the evidence she hopes will save her relationship, return to her the idealistic man she fell in love with (he was supposed to be a novelist before selling his soul. Ho hum.). But having her read from a file in the middle of a barney pulls the scene into a didactic lay-by, making it hard to get a handle on this couple from the get-go. How have they got to this stage? Why are they together in the first place? What’s missing is a sense of claustrophobia and desperation you’d expect from a break-up. Ditto a sense of the emotional clumsiness of young people trying to reconcile coupledom with fledgling adult identity. Sophie talks in the language of immature, uncompromising, idealism – she suggests Tom is racist for what she sees as complicity in abuse of African children – but this seems to go unflagged by the direction. It all feels a little leaden, though the physical presence of Ian McDiarmid as Sophie’s late father Edward adds an interesting psychological wrinkle to the scene.
What follows is spicier. We skip back to 1998, to Edward’s island retreat in Patmos, Greece – he has just resigned his post as a bishop and an old friend is trying to persuade him to change his mind. He is also meeting daughter Sophie’s new boyfriend Tom for the first time. Over a meal prepared by Edward’s straight-talking Russian housekeeper Tatyana – welcome comic relief expertly dished out by Bronagh Gallagher - Edward’s cross-examination of eager-to-impress Tom overlaps with rumination on Christianity and in particular the church’s attitude to gays, before running into another blazing row. Big themes are thrown out as ouzo is downed: scriptural interpretation, colonialism, love and the importance of story-telling. The writing is snappy and McDiarmid is appropriately flamboyant as the erudite, eccentric left-wing bishop.
Act two hops to a gay wedding in Surrey, 2006. Then back to Patmos and an incredibly tender scene in which Sophie strip-washes her increasingly senile father and changes his incontinence pad. These grim realities are too much for Tom, whose undisguised horror and physical contortions (lots of dry heaving) are played for uncomfortable laughs.
A second interval, and we’re in the present day and Sophie and Tom – both vaguely attached to other people – are making love. Or trying to. Somehow, they find themselves mired in an argument – revisiting old ground, her idealism versus his capitulation to big, bad reality – the chemistry is spot on here, the home truths painful. Both writing and acting have hit their stride, and the tragedy of these two characters caught between their love for each other and their moral scruples – or lack of them, is palpable. A wave of sorrow threatens to break.
There’s a lot to grapple with in The Faith Machine. And the play is at its best when the big questions of religion and purpose are rooted in the smaller, subtler moments between characters – whether that’s pissed guests at a wedding, or a dying man struggling to communicate with his daughter. There are a few clunkers – for one awful moment the play seems to have found its conclusion in a broken-down Tom asking the heavens ‘who am I?’. Thankfully there are still a few more lines to come that give a little more finesse. More of a sense of place, perhaps through sound – especially in the New York opening – would have nudged everything closer to perfection.
In the main though, the writing is deft and familiar, weaving in everything from human trafficking to Lady Gaga, guiding us gently through an intricate and thoroughly modern moral maze.
