BWW Reviews: THE CHRISTIANS, Gate Theatre, September 9 2015

Pastor Paul's church started small but has now grown to a megachurch, a big business that reaches deep into its Southern United States community with its professional class filling its Board of Elders and its underclass (and plenty more) filling its pews and its coffers. On the very day that the loan that constructed the vast building is finally paid down, Pastor Paul delivers a sermon that denies the existence of Hell, fracturing his congregation irrevocably and setting him, and everyone who has worked so hard for him, on different paths.

The Christians (at the Gate Theatre until 3 October) asks some tricky questions, not just about religion, but about how commitments to causes can affect commitments to people (including family); about how churches, just like any other corporation, can grow too big to fail; and about the responsibilities and compromises of leadership. Tough stuff indeed!

It doesn't start that way though. For ten or so glorious minutes, we're treated to a 17-strong choir singing happy-clappy hymns that are so easy to dismiss haughtily from a European perspective, yet are so hard to resist - like the ear-worming advertising jingles they resemble in form and function. Following straight after, we're treated to the fateful sermon beautifully spoken by William Gaminara's Pastor, with the rising and falling cadences that characterise evangelical preachers - and American Presidential candidates.

Lucas Hnath's awkward play never again reaches those heights, concentrating on conversations between Paul and those who are left confused and abandoned by his volte-face. Stefan Adegbola invests Paul's charismatic rival with the certainty of youth; David Calvitto's Elder is full of middle-class reasonableness; and Jaye Griffiths' wife burns with indignation at being let down. But, perhaps, we don't care much about their beefs - it is Lucy Ellinson's cameo as a single mum on welfare that hits home. The church is both her financial and spiritual safety net, fulfilling roles that in Europe would be played by the family (well, sometimes) and the State (though less often than was once the case). The threat to her child's soul proves greater than the threat to what little stability she has in her life and you feel for her awful choice.

All powerful, dramatic and engaging theatre for sure, but just a teensy-weensy bit dull for those of us without a dog in the liturgical fight. I'd have liked a few more hymns.