When we go to the English theatre for a play about religion we’re likely to be rewarded with Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, which tells the kids that God is dead, or with Howard Brenton’s Paul, which claims that the protagonist’s Damascene conversion was the result of a con-trick by some desperate Disciples. But in America, cynicism isn’t so prevalent and intelligent dramatists like Stephen Adly Guirgis have a metaphysical sense that they’re not embarrassed to show or share.

Hence Guirgis’s fine Jesus Hopped the A Train, which dealt with questions of fate and free will and suggested that there was spiritual value even in a serial killer en route to execution. And hence Guirgis’s less impressive but more complicated new play, which takes the Disciple who betrayed Jesus and was damned to Hell as a result and subjects him to a trial in “downtown purgatory”, a place whose accents and the legal processes are pure New York.

Too much New York, maybe. One doesn’t want an earnestly pi, reverential play. But do we want one which tries to make big, big issues palatable by coating them not with sugar but, at times, with bubblegum? For unclear reasons, St Monica, mother of St Augustine, is first into the court and tells us not to “get up in my grill cos I’ll mess your shit up”, and several of those following her, up to a cool-dude Pilate in golfing clothes, keep us giggling at their demotic anachronisms. There’s a jocularity, even a facetiousness, which suggests that Guirgis doesn’t trust his subject’s inherent seriousness.

Yet he can be serious, even when Mark Lockyer’s jokily obsequious prosecution counsel is assailing witness Freud, who thinks suicides like Judas are clinically insane, or when Susan Lynch’s fiercely eloquent defence lawyer is attacking witness Mother Teresa for her conservative views, or both are shrinking from a genuinely scarey Douglas Henshall as witness Satan. We also get dignified anguishings from Gawn Grainger as high priest Caiaphas and from John Macmillan as Simon the Zealot, who suspects Judas betrayed Jesus in order to provoke Him into declaring Himself the Messiah and leading an anti-Roman rebellion.

There are plenty of questions about how a loving God can create Hell and allow damnation, but no answer to them or, indeed, about what motivated Iscariot. But there’s a hint of an answer in the last scene, when Edward Hogg’s Jesus embraces Joseph Mawle’s sweaty, self-hating Judas, only to be viciously rebuffed. The man is offered love and refuses it. Is this the ultimate example of the ultimate sin, despair? Perhaps so, perhaps not.

But I can’t think of a British dramatist who would begin to consider such an idea.

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