Review: SIT OR KNEEL, The Other Palace

Many a recent headline has luxuriated in Gen Z becoming one of the largest demographics at church services in the UK – we’re the ones who made the papal conclave go viral, after all. Fitting then, that the latest voice-of-a-generation one-hander to transfer from the Edinburgh Fringe is about a young woman who becomes a vicar.

Like many a one-woman show protagonist in her twenties, Mimi Nation-Dixon’s Margot comes to her new rural parish chasing demons from her past, and struggles with feeling behind her university peers as they join the London rat race. She spies Jonathan, one of her only parishioners under the age of 30, in the pews one day, and agonises constantly over his eye contact during services and sporadic WhatsApp messages.

You may observe that I haven’t actually mentioned God or Jesus so far. That’s because, for a play where the protagonist dons a cassock for most of her time on stage, Sit or Kneel doesn’t spend all that much time interrogating its lead’s relationship with her faith (if she has one at all).

Like her character, Nation-Dixon is a theology graduate in real life, but her writing’s interrogation of what it means to be a young religious person doesn’t seem to go far beyond cheap shots at child sex abuse in the church, or caricatures of busybody parishioners making penis jokes in questionable regional accents.

Margot as a character is constructed in a promising way, but never clear how exactly her university experience of sexual assault and her estrangement from her family have led her to a life in the cloth, and if being a vicar has changed her at all. Certain intriguing plot threads – a snarky “voice of God” interrupting Margot’s monologue, or Jonathan’s implied atheism – are frequently dropped in favour of more juvenile humour, or ideas that have been done better by Fleabag or one of its myriad imitators.

Scattered though the show is, it is carried by Nation-Dixon herself, an endlessly expressive performer. The themes on display here – neurotic single twenty-somethings, trauma and sexuality, body image issues – hardly reinvent the wheel, but they feel reenergised thanks to Nation-Dixon’s relentless physicality, versatile voice work and the fleeting hints of melancholy she allows to show on her face.

What’s more, Nation-Dixon seems ambitious as a writer, able and willing to handle subjects far outside the realm of religion. And perhaps that’s a good thing, since her writing is perhaps most astute when the Jehovah’s Witness gags are stripped away and we get a brief insight into who our lead was before she put on her clerical collar.

This type of writing, well-observed but without a clear idea of what it wants to be, might shine more in a format less tightly structured and less constrained by time, so it’s pleasing to know that Nation-Dixon is developing Sit or Kneel into a TV pilot. With more screentime to develop the characters of Margot and those around her, Sit or Kneel is sure to earn a passionate congregation of fans.

Sit or Kneel plays at The Other Palace until 26 October