In 1928, the eclectic Belgian playwright Michel de Ghelderode was invited to write a play for Holy Week; he chose to dramatise the release of the murderer Barabbas, redeemed by the Jews in preference to his cellmate, Jesus.
Victor Sobchak of Theatre Collection adapts and directs, and the result is that rarity: a play without a single redeeming feature. The script is clodhopping and the acting a bumble of different styles and almost incomprehensible accents. The set design is non-existent and the costumes as various as the actors who wear them.
But the real problem here is the politics. It takes sensitivity to dramatise events that are the original excuse for Christian anti-Semitism, and that’s not a quality that Sobchak prizes. The absence of any kind of subtlety leaves us with a party-pack of gibbering morons and hand-wringing, malevolent Jews, all saying remarkably little, in a great many words, about the founding legend of Western civilisation.