The Last Days of Judas Iscariot
Almeida, N1

The Black & White Ball
King’s Theatre, N1

Given that courtroom drama is usually gripping, the trial of history’s greatest villain, Judas Iscariot, ought to be a throat-grabber. Unfortunately, with The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, Stephen Adly Guirgis, writer of the acclaimed Jesus Hopped the A Train, has produced something too verbose and muddled to be genuinely dramatic.

The trial takes place in Purgatory and is, technically, an appeal, as Judas (Joseph Mawle) is already in Hell. Mawle spends much of the play crouched in glazed horror, speechless, hands held open. Hell is not a fiery lake made by God for sinners, it’s a self-created pit of despair.

Playing arch villains is always wicked fun, so Douglas Henshall is bound to delight as the cosmos’s arch villain, Satan. Judas first encounters him in flashback to a sleazy dive, Bath-sheba’s Bar and Grill, calling out for “two barrels of wine and a hooker menu”. (Much of Guirgis’s humour derives from this coupling of the eternal to the banal.) Satan is a picture of scuzzy malignity, like a 1970s porn director, with greased-back blond hair, white Gucci jacket, unbuttoned shirt, a crucifix round his neck, tight black jeans, pointy shoes and a lit cigarette permanently in hand. There’s no Miltonic grandeur, no glimpse of the fallen archangel who “with the setting sun, dropt from the zenith, like a falling star”, so there’s no pathos.

Henshall’s is, though, a brilliant comic performance that almost redeems a flabby and windy play. Comedy gives way not to tragedy but to real nastiness when he reveals a lacerating tongue that could strip paint at 40 paces. As the trial progresses, we increasingly see his demonic hatred for the world, his revelling in the spectacle of human agony, twirling his cigarette, eyes creased up in a mirthless smile.

Too often Guirgis seems to think that the more ingredients you bung in, the better the result. Unfortunately, this is no more true of a play than it is of a cake. Sigmund Freud appears as a defence witness, for no obvious reason and to only muted comic effect, adding nothing to the evening except an extra 20 minutes’ running time. Saint Monica is energetically performed by Jessika Williams, yet quite gratuitously portrayed as a pottymouthed black woman in red velour trackies and gold hoop earrings. Maybe such irreverence towards Christianity is still daringly subversive Stateside; or maybe it’s a joke about Monica, Saint Augustine’s mother (“I birthed the muthaf***a”), being African. Whichever, it’s a joke in dubious taste. Nor does it help the play that its Jesus is so limp and weedy. Pon-tius Pilate recalls him as a good man, though he did “smell like a goat”. Not here. This Jesus, in white jeans and speaking in a wheedling alto, would smell of paraben-free calendula-oil deodorant. You can’t see him thrashing money-changers, hurling insults at the Pharisees or promising to bring fire upon the earth.

Guirgis breaks a cardinal rule by introducing a completely new character right at the end, who delivers a three-page monologue on an entirely new subject. Pushing boundaries and rule-breaking are admirable only if they work. Like much else here, this fails. This is a playwright overconfident in his abilities, which not even a director of Rupert Goold’s talents, throwing in rap music and big-screen images of speeded-up New York nightlife, can disguise. It lacks the simplicity of conviction.

A better bet altogether for a theatre night out oop north London would be The Black & White Ball, the campy new musical by Warner Brown, at the King’s Head, Islington, based on classic songs by Cole Porter such as Love for Sale, You’ve Got That Thing and All Through the Night. Often a musical bolted on to existing and much-loved songs turns out a mess, but this is effective.

The story concerns Johnny/Jay (Chris Ellis-Stanton), a young writer from Montana who arrives in New York with his first novel to be literarily lionised. He marries his older, sassier publisher, Suzanne (Katherine Kingsley), with suspicious ease. However, Johnny is repeatedly drawn back to a young drag-queen dancer at a men-only club. Yes, it’s an eternal triangle, only it’s not the wife in the middle, it’s the husband.

Both leads are enjoyable to watch – Ellis-Stanton is handsome and open-faced, and Kingsley is excellent, with a melancholy beneath her haughty Manhattan composure. There’s some witty dialogue: “Oh, you.” “Do you only speak in vowels?” “My consonants have deserted me.”

If the voices aren’t top-flight, they amply fill the intimate, leg-cramping space of the King’s Head with Porter’s hoppety rhythms and outrageous rhymes (“tortured” and “orchard” was my favourite). Liza Pulman is a perfect nightclub singer, in a figure-hugging black dress, with a white flower in her hair and a fixed smile that takes up half her face; and a pigtailed Lillie Bone is utterly convincing as Little Leah. It’s not serious stuff, but at least it knows it.

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