One wouldn't expect a play about an aging Anglican clergyman to pack such a punch as to sweep all four Best Play awards on the London stage. Yet such was the acclaim that greeted David Hare's "Racing Demon" when first produced at the Royal National Theatre in 1990. Why it took so long to get to America is anyone's guess.

"Racing Demon" is one of a trilogy of plays (along with "Murmuring Judges" and "The Absence of War") in which Hare examines Britain's tottering institutions. It sets before us a story embodying a debate about divine compassion and human care, as well as a slew of issues concerning faith, revelation, homosexuality and ministry, prayer, pastoral care of the poor, and the role of the church in society.

As I settled into the plush seats of the inviting arena of the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center, I wondered if this play would offer more of the same sort of unfair stereotyping we have seen so often in portrayals of clergy, who are generally depicted as bumbling, hyperpious, sterile, forgetful, wheedling, and whining--that is, when they are not homicidal maniacs who quote Scripture while dispatching their victims. But Hare gives us a plausible picture of four Anglican priests who operate a social service in an impoverished area of London.

All action takes place in an austere raised space shaped like a cross. The spare, abstemious staging and artistic direction of Richard Eyre make the spectator feel like a participant-observer in a musty church or around its seamy edges. Eyre and company have re-created their London visual setting for this New York performance and populated it with an excellent set of experienced American actors: Josef Sommer (as the elderly liberal clergyman, Lionel Espy), Michael Cumpsty (as his young evangelical assistant, Tony Ferris), Kathryn Meisle (as Tony's girlfriend, Frances Parnell), Kathleen Chalfant (as the head parson's passive-aggressive wife).

Liberal and evangelical clerical prototypes provide the central conflict for the play. The liberal is Lionel, a confused, discouraged, spiritually fatigued clergyman, an Anglican elitist from a family with "a great clerical name," now penitently working as a social caregiver and depressed permissivist. Tony, his energetic, new assistant, is a spirited evangelical from a working-class background, now upwardly mobile and ready to rise into church leadership.

The title of the play refers metaphorically to the demonic impulses pervading and threatening to take over every level of church life--laity and clergy, liberal and conservative, liturgy and relief work, theology and practice. It is the demonic against which all the ministers are racing in various ways, and whose effects they wish to mend in order to nurture the people of God.

The play opens with the battered balding priest Lionel praying, "God, where are you? I wish you would talk to me. It isn't just me. There's a general feeling. This is what people are saying in the parish. They want to know where you are. The joke wears thin. . . . But the people also think, I didn't realize when he said nothing, he really did mean absolutely nothing at all."

Lionel's wily bishop (played by George N. Martin) is from the outset warning him of discontent among his parishioners: "They have come to doubt you. Maybe question the power of your convictions." The bishop, cynical about seeking unity in teaching, advises Lionel to put on a better liturgical performance. "Only one thing unites us. The administration of the sacrament. Finally that's what you're there for."

Evangelicals will find most interesting the character of Tony Ferris, the lively young curate just out of seminary and so the least experienced member of the team, who criticizes the banality of the team's ministry and asks for more direct testimony to the saving power of Christ.

The play hinges on a series of soliloquies in the form of prayers, which provide a window into each key character. In Tony's soliloquy, he says to God: "Christ didn't come to sit on a committee. He didn't come to do social work. He came to preach repentance. And to offer everyone the chance of redemption. In their innermost being. God, please help Lionel to see this. . . . Can you tell me, is anything right with the Church? I mean, is the big joke that having lived and died on the cross, Jesus would bequeath us--what?--total confusion, a host of good intentions, and an endlessly revolving cyclostyle [duplicating] machine?"

The only case study in pastoral care occurs with Stella, a distressed black woman whose husband does not want any more children; she has just had an abortion. "They knock you out. Then they wake you up and it's over. 'Cept for me it wa'n't." She comes to Lionel asking what the church teaches about abortion. After reluctantly admitting that "abortion is wrong," all Lionel can do is offer her Kleenex and a "very low-key" prayer. Lionel's pastoral theory is "Let them come to you," "don't judge," and never mention the Bible.

When Tony asks: "Isn't this the perfect moment to tell her about Christ?", Lionel answers: "I don't approve of cashing in on people's unhappiness." The churches are empty, says Tony. When presented with a problem, we send the needy away with a half-hearted prayer. Tony suspects these two facts are linked: low parish responsiveness and inarticulate witness to Christ. "The statistics are appalling. We feel we've had a good Sunday if between us we attract one percent."

Tony wants to energize the congregation with evangelical preaching as the ground of serious social service. Lionel wants to listen to the congregation and serve them in their pain, to learn from them and to empathize deeply with them without requiring any response. Meanwhile, the church is becoming ever more inconsequential within an increasingly demoralized society.

The catalyst in the briskly developing story is the bishop's decision to expel Lionel from his parish for being unable to make the sacramental life come alive and for being uncertain about the essential teachings of the church. Such an expulsion may seem improbable; anyone who knows the Anglican ethos has a hard time imagining a bishop so concerned about "putting on a show" sacramentally that he makes a cause celebre out of a mild-mannered clergyman who seems only to have empathy for the poor. In dramatic terms, however, the premise is effective, highlighting the contrast between Lionel and Tony.

Hare deals evenhandedly with the two pastors who represent sharply defined alternatives for the church: the tired and waning liberal ministries of compassion versus the emergent and exuberant ministries of evangelical proclamation. Neither prototype comes even close to being flawless, and yet neither is clearly evil. Meanwhile, the demonic is racing throughout the church and chalking up victories across the theological/political spectrum.

Lionel's way of compassionately ministering seems to be stagnating in hopelessness. Tony's way of spirited proclamation seems to be ready to steamroller over human needs and vulnerabilities. Lionel has a miserable relationship with his miserable wife. Tony has not yet entered into the real task of mating and parenting but appears overconfident in his ability to put all things in good order under the commandment of God. "I have accepted a supernatural religion. Since I did that, everything has changed."

But Hare is far too cunning a playwright to present a static opposition between these contrasting types. Indeed, in the course of the play all the characters--not only Lionel and Tony--undergo a transformation of some kind. The bishop, Charlie, for example, changes from one interested mainly in peacemaking in his diocese--maintaining the status quo--to one who stands up for feeding the sheep. "You parade your so-called humility until it becomes a disgusting kind of pride," he says to Lionel. "Yes, we can all be right if we never actually do anything. In any other job you'd have been fired years ago." The bishop is making an example of Lionel, he tells him, because "you are the reason why the whole church is dying. Immobile. Wracked. Burned inward. Caught in a cycle of decline. Your personal integrity your only concern. Incapable of reaching out. A great vacillating pea-green half-set jelly."

That denunciation carries considerable persuasive force. And yet Lionel is portrayed more positively as the action progresses. At the beginning of the play, he seems to be merely wishy-washy, comically incapable of providing any plausible rationale for his ministry. But as the play develops, his weaknesses seem to turn into strengths. Faced with the bishop's charges, he shows himself capable of at least modest resistance. By the end, Lionel appears as a martyr to church politics, admirable not only in his identification with the suffering of his parishioners but even in his uncertainty.

It is in contrast to Tony, perhaps, more than in any action of his own, that Lionel appears to grow in stature. From the perspective of the audience, it is almost as if the playwright himself undergoes a change of viewpoint between the two acts. At first he presents the young evangelical so sympathetically as to appear to endorse his critique of the latitudinarianism of Lionel's meandering social ministry. By the end of the play, however, Tony is portrayed as so rigid, so ecstatic, so fixated, so alienating, that it is hard to identify with him at all.

Tony's flaws are revealed with particular clarity in his relationship with his girlfriend, Frances, the agnostic, disillusioned daughter of a distinguished missionary family, with whom he breaks up in the course of the play. In their first scene he is already talking about ending their relationship. They have just made love. He has done so, he says, in the religious context of their implicit long-term commitment and is uneasy about their continuing in premarital infidelity, for fear that it will dissipate his energies for ministry. He "feels rotten"--"worried about how it may look to the rest of the world." In response, Frances notes, "For the record--I didn't make love in any 'context.' Whatever that may mean. I made love because I wanted you. Is that really such a terrible idea?"

She feels disvalued and ignored, convinced that all Tony wants to do is to carry the cross, which she's had enough of from her missionary background. And yet it is he, the presumed caregiver, who has depended on her for caregiving, for she has repeatedly gotten him through his major crises: the death of his parents and his ordination, with all its accompanying feelings of unworthiness. For his part, Tony is now feeling ready to "clear out of the way" the ambivalence of his private life, the ambivalence between being thrilled and made anxious by their trysts. Ironically, Frances is willing to articulate the one word her priest-lover is most frightened to use: "The word is sin. Why don't you use it? You've been sinning." It's in keeping with Hare's deliberately unsettling use of shifting perspectives that, as the action progresses, Frances changes from a skeptic to one who talks with God and who finally ends in going out to do relief work in some distant place of service analogous to a mission field where God's name is not known, where God--as distorted by the visible church--does not exist.

Tony's lack of empathy and simple human feeling--in marked contrast to Lionel--is also apparent in his sanctimonious fixation on viewing suffering as divine punishment. When Lionel's wife has a stroke, Tony sees it as a providential sign that Lionel should change his life and redefine his staggering ministry. Tony sees the death of his parents as a shock that set him on his path to his present ministry. "Through suffering we learn." Finally, he complacently concludes that his real conversion occurred at the point of his giving up Frances. And so in his last scene the goal-oriented Tony is preparing a huge billboard for evangelism, remarking: "It'll be like saying Christ really belongs. Not just in church. But in the high street." He boasts: "We've doubled our numbers each week."

Some people coming out of the theater thought they had clearly identified the "demon" in the title: Tony. I think rather that the demonic is saturating the whole church ethos, and all principal characters.

Tony is right about his critique of the church and its need to proclaim Christ. He is wrong when he assumes that the success of evangelism can be counted in numbers, and in his excessive subjectivism, which turns toward an oversimplified theodicy that leaves no mystery in the purpose of God in relation to evil and suffering.

Those who see the parson's world as intrinsically boring and narrow will encounter in this play characters with whom anyone could meaningfully identify and converse. Those who share the suffering that is occurring within the body of Christ will find in it an accurate mirror of much that characterizes the church today, not only Anglican but the whole church. I strongly encourage community theaters and church drama groups to consider producing "Racing Demon." It offers a compelling, provocative statement of alternative views of the church and a variety of interpretations of the readiness of clergy for ministry.

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE

May/June 1996, Vol. 2, No. 3, Page 28

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