Review: THE POPESS, The Glitch

‘What do you look for in faith?’ This is the question proclaimed by Italian performer Elena Mazzon in The Popess, before she launches upon unsuspecting audience members in search of individual responses. In a city where nearly a third of the population identify as atheist or agnostic, the reaction is as about as stone-faced as you would expect.

The audience might not be an especially enthusiastic congregation for Mazzon, but she’s picked fertile ground for this one-woman show, which she also wrote. Its subject is the obscure 13th-century Guglielmite sect, who preached of a female Second Coming of Christ – Bohemian noblewoman Guglielma – and elected a woman as their pope.

Mazzon is an expressive performer who certainly understands the power of organised religion from a variety of perspectives. While the show starts out as a straightforward biography of a follower of Guglielma, Mazzon eventually shows her range; she’s equally as convincing as the nervously curious would-be heretic, the village gossip only interested in heretic sects as a way to meet men, the converted zealot and eventually the female pope Sister Maifreda herself.

Unfortunately, though, the show fails to move past simply performing religious zeal towards actually analysing what drives people towards dying for their faith – it’s ironic that Mazzon asks the audience for solutions to this question without coming up with any of her own. Our unnamed female narrator speaks of wanting to understand why her mother died giving birth to her, but beyond that her induction into the Guglielmites is rather rushed in the narrative, and we never quite get a clear picture of her relationship with her faith.

Even more disappointing is the failure to provide any more interesting understanding of why Guglielma’s followers were willing to die for this feminised version of Christianity, beyond the surface level reality that the sect provided a path for them beyond marriage or the convent. Women have been active in the Catholic Church as saints, mystics and leaders of fringe communities since its inception, and so a deeper probing of why Guglielma’s specific cult found such fervent evangelists in medieval women would have been welcome.

Against this lack of clear dramatic intention, the elements of comedy and audience participation fall even flatter. The theological questions near the start of the show, though awkward, can be excused as a tool for audience reflection; the same cannot be said for demanding to know if audience members have “been in here before”, after our heretic congregation eventually gets confined in a jail cell. The cheaply employed, ambiguous UK regional accent Mazzon employs to play the jailer doesn’t help, either.

Indeed, much of the show’s second half, after our narrator and her sect face the consequences of being labelled heretics, relies too strongly on its standup-inspired elements, including, most egregiously, a segment where Mazzon teaches the audience to sing a hymn to Guglielma. It’s supposed to conjure up some kind of solidarity with the Guglielmites as they await their fate – one lucky audience member also gets to read out a confession of their ‘crimes’ – but the payoff is minimal when Mazzon hasn’t done enough for us to feel spiritually invested in the sect’s aims.

Mazzon clearly has some grasp here of the power of personal spirituality and the appeal of religious communities, even if it’s not fully articulated. The Popess is an attractive work because of this and because of the compelling historical story behind it, but it ultimately lacks the tonal clarity to be as moving as the many greater plays written about religion.

The Popess plays at The Glitch until 8 September