Doubt – Footnotes
The Footnotes to our episode on Doubt include observations on the cat and mouse duel between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn, and the journey for Sister James from innocence to doubt and confusion.
Cat and Mouse
Lia Williams, the director of the 2022 production of Doubt at the Chichester Festival Theatre, described the play as a thriller. It certainly has the tension of a crime thriller, particularly in the cat and mouse duel between the protagonists. Sister Aloysius resembles the detective or prosecutor who pursues her prime target, her suspicions based initially on not much more than her instincts. Amusingly this metaphor of the deadly game that is played out between her and Father Flynn is explicitly signalled in the film version of the play when the housekeeper bursts in on Sister Aloysius and Sister James holding a cat and the mouse that it has just killed. “It takes a cat” she declares triumphantly, to which Sister Aloysius replies thoughtfully “Yes it does”, beginning to formulate her plan to entrap the priest. In the end she catches her prey.
Here is a link to the scene in the film

Innocence
Early in the play Sister Aloysius describes the enthusiastic young teacher, Sister James, as a “very innocent person”. She believes that “innocent teachers are easily duped”, so counsels her to be more “skeptical” about the motives and behaviour of her students, and perhaps of the adults as well. Sister James has doubts about looking “at things and people with suspicion”; it feels for her as if she’s “less close to God”. It certainly sounds like a less Christian view of others. However Sister Aloysius has a darker view of humanity, borne from experience: “If I could…I would certainly choose to live in innocence. But innocence can only be wisdom in a world without evil.” Even more than that she feels it is her duty to seek out evil, even at the expense of her own innocence: “When you take a step to address wrongdoing, you are taking a step away from God, but in His service.”
Sister James’s hopeful view of people is not easily supplanted. She cannot conceive that anyone who had done something wrong and was confronted by it would not be repentant. Sister Aloysius advises her that she “must try to imagine a very different person than yourself” – someone not as innocent. But when Father Flynn explains the reason for his meeting with Donald Muller, she still readily accepts his account and even challenges Sister Aloysius in her persistent suspicion.
By the end of the play, Sister James, has been disabused of her innocence. She has withdrawn somewhat from the children in her class, uncertain how to relate to them. The truth about Father Flynn’s behaviour remains uncertain, but the possibility of his evil and his lying have been deeply unsettling for her. As Father Flynn himself said to her: “The truth…tends to be confusing and have no clear conclusion”. She confesses that she can’t sleep at night: “Everything seems uncertain”. She has been expelled from the garden into the real world of doubt and confusion.
063 – Dancing at Lughnasa, by Brian Friel
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Brian Friel’s magical memory play Dancing at Lughnasa is set at the time of the harvest festival in rural Ireland in 1936. It’s account of the events of that summer in the house of the five unmarried Mundy sisters is filtered many years later through the memory of Michael, the son of the youngest sister. His memory is undoubtedly unreliable, but it is also funny, poetic and profoundly poignant.
Josie Rourke, who directs the gorgeous new production of the play currently playing at the National Theatre in London, joins us to explore Friel’s spellbinding masterpiece.
062 – Private Lives, by Noël Coward
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Noël Coward’s play Private Lives is both a dazzling dramatic comedy and an excoriating portrait of love and marriage among the disaffected elite of the Jazz Age. Coward himself starred in the premiere production in both London and New York in 1930, the critics acclaiming the show’s construction and wit, but predicting that it would not last. As a new production opens at the Donmar theatre in London, I ask Coward’s newest biographer, Oliver Soden, why the play has aged so well.
061 – Sea Creatures, by Cordelia Lynn
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Cordelia Lynn’s play Sea Creatures is a poetic exploration of loss and grief, its setting betwixt the sea and shore rich in metaphoric resonances. As we record this episode, Sea Creatures is playing at the Hampstead Theatre in London in a spellbinding production directed by James Macdonald.
I am delighted to be joined by playwright Cordelia Lynn to talk about her fascinating new play.
The 2020 Theatre Diary – March
Before the theatres went dark this month I was lucky enough to see Caryl Churchill’s A Number at the Bridge, and spend more than seven hours in thrall to Robert Lepage’s Seven Streams of the River Ota at the National. Plus, some thoughts on what we miss when there is no theatre.
The 2020 Theatre Diary – February
Another great mix of shows this month, from Tom Stoppard’s new play, to Ibsen, Beckett and newer plays in smaller London venues.
The 2020 Theatre Diary – January
The January roundup included both classic plays, such as The Duchess of Malfi, Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters, as well as recent musicals Dear Evan Hansen and Girl from the North Country …
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