Reasonable Doubt

Absolution

Here are two plays which, without being exceptionally good, at least manage to be interestingly topical. To see Reasonable Doubt, which involves the reunion of two ex-jurors who originally disagreed when they were deciding a murder case that’s now being retried, is to think of Barry George. To see Absolution is to be directly faced with the predicament of abusive Catholic priests. Predicament? Bloody deaths would be more accurate.

Owen O’Neill, remembered in Edinburgh for his appearances in Twelve Angry Men and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, is the “avenging angel” in his own one-man play. His unnamed protagonist describes stalking, confronting, killing four spoiled Irish priests, on the first occasion slicing off both penis and testicles (”this is for your own good”) and burying the corpse.

As directed by Rachel O’Riordan, this is grimly riveting stuff, but only towards the end is it much more than a piece of emerald-isle Tarantino. That’s when the revenger meets the young priest who has been forcing himself on six-year-old girls, and is welcomed by an agonised man who says he can’t stop, can’t add suicide to his sins, “but I have spoken to God and he has sent you”. For the first time O’Neill credits the Church with a sense of morality, and he itallicises that with a coup de théâtre that I can’t reveal. Let’s just say that there may be priests who, feeling that the authorities have failed victimised children, have found highly unorthodox solutions.

If Absolution is a piece of grand guignol with ethical pretensions, Suzie Miller’s Reasonable Doubt is a romantic drama with secrets to unfold. The 12-person reunion Emma Jackson’s Anna has organised is actually a fake. Her real aim is to reconnect with Peter Phelps’s Mitchell, with whom she shared a night which, though platonic, she recalls as the best of her life.

She had voted for the conviction of a man who drove his errant lover into a tree; he made a brilliantly eloquent speech for acquittal. But both turn out to be concealing key facts, he the most serious, since it has a bearing on the integrity she admires. I was left feeling a bit so-whattish by a play that’s nevertheless well written and finely acted by its Australian performers. But then what should one expect on the Edinburgh Fringe? Finished masterpieces?

Box office: 0131-632 3030