This is a tough script that has been competently delivered by a young student cast. It is an intense and emotional play well-suited to the small venue in which it is performed.Dr Martha Livingstone, played by Rebecca Clee, is onstage throughout and thus, to some extent, must carry the play. She struggles to convey the detached professionalism of a psychiatrist but comes into her own in the more personal parts of her role. Her infatuation with a Frenchman is eminently believable and real.I recently had dinner with a nun. She had a sense of calm that Sister Agnes requires in this role but with which Alanna Flynn struggles. Where her character struggles with mania and the extremes of emotion she is in her element. The Mother Superior, Sister Miriam, was burdened with a pectoral cross that spoke more of bling than religious commitment and gave Lynsey Balloch a difficult task in persuading us that she was a caring nun. While things are going to unfold during the play, we do need to sense at the start that this is a caring human being with a pastoral heart. She, too, delivers a better performance when talking of her own trauma.The youth of the cast does not help in delivering the more mature characters in the play. This is understandable. However this is, at heart, a religious play dealing with issues of religious and metaphysical angst. It is unfortunate that one of the strongest parts of the Mother Superior’s performance comes in her exposition of atheistic themes. When she is called upon to be a religious it is clear that there is no real understanding of a vocation. It is in conveying the religious aspects of the script that the actors struggle most.I attended the show on the opening night. Some technical issues remain that can be addressed, particularly in the lighting. One unfortunate issue that cannot be addressed is the proximity of another production that appears to revolve around drumming. More unfortunately the main drumming sections overlapped with some of the more emotional and sensitive parts of this play.This is a play that is currently well-delivered and may well mature if greater sensitivity to the religious and theological aspects can be more brought into the production.
