Hot on the heels of the National Theatre's revival of Howard Barker's 'Scenes from an Execution', here's the UK premiere of the cult playwright's latest work, an indulgent but verbally dazzling subversion of the biblical story of Lot and his wife.
In the Book of Genesis we are told little more about Mrs Lot than that the ever-charming Old Testament God turned her into a pillar of salt as she fled the doomed city of Sodom. Here she is given both a name – Sverdlosk – and a voice.
Hermione Gulliford is alluring, amusing and slightly scary as a self-possessed and sexual woman who coolly seduces the angel Drogheda (a broodingly nasty Justin Avoth), just one incident in a life that seems to be led as one great, urbane gesture of opposition against a bigoted God.
Mark Tandy is good as a bookish Lot, both empowered and paralysed by his overwhelming decency, and it's a typically impressive Print Room set from designer Fotini Dimou, a dilapidated café with elements of both greasy spoon and stony sepulchre.
Still, there's something about Robyn Winfield Smith's production that didn't really work for me. Some business with Drogheda's callous torment of a nameless waiter (Vincent Enderby) brings in a misfiring physical note to an overwhelmingly cerebral production.
And for all the precise, pyrotechnic wit of Barker's language, 'Lot and His God' lacks dynamics: a clever riff on a topic rather than a truly satisfying whole. It begins in Stygian gloom and it ends there too; in between, there's not much sense of journey.