Grace and Laurie are two friends who decide to become prophets, in order to disprove the dying words of their friend, Eve, who recently committed suicide. Reading Eve’s suicide note changes their world views entirely, in an attempt to dislodge the perceived haunting presence of Eve, they decide to attempt to disprove Eve’s belief that there is a God, and he makes people evil. They decide to try being good and evil, one each, becoming “Gods Anointed” prophets.
Littered with problems, painful dialogue and is not saved by the performances of the cast.
The two lead actors really struggle with the heavy dialogue. Both are unable to inject variation into their tone or delivery; they have calm mode and shouty mode – that’s about it. Also, Laurie has a bad case of wavy hands. It takes half the show for anyone who can act to get onstage, and then they get killed off pretty quickly. There are long chunks of the show that take place on the floor of the stage, which are invisible to anyone behind the front row. Thank god for the tech indicating when people were murdered.
The lead characters have to be absolute idiots for the plot of the show to make any sense. These university students get the slightest whiff of an alternative world view and they are tearing their hair out trying to convert to it. The script is dragged down by verbose and badly poetic dialogue – that would be hell to deliver even as a monologue – but is rammed awkwardly into conversations between Grace and Laurie. A lot of what they do is stand around and talk about the ‘philosophy’ behind the plot.
Then the script goes off the rails. A scene starts with Laurie narrating his evening being evil becomes interspersed with Grace asking questions about how the scene progresses, changing and influencing Laurie and eventually bursting straight into the scene itself. From where? Was she hiding behind a curtain at the student bar, the walk to Laurie’s flat and during the seduction scene? Furthermore, thematically, the script shows a nasty romanticism of suicide during the finale of the piece, when the suicidal Eve is described as having “too much soul”.
The script is littered with problems, painful dialogue and is not saved by the performances of the cast. I am unable to recommend this show to anyone.
