Edinburgh 2002

Fringe

Palace of Weariness
Greyfriars Kirk House

Federico Fernandez Armesto

According to one school of thought the best way to draw in audiences is to make sure that your fifty words in the fringe programme portray an idea that is as crazy and zany as possible.

In Palace of Weariness, set in 2001, Christ (played by an American woman) lives alone, converses with an imaginary dog, tries to date Joan of Arc and books an appointment with an acupuncturist. It’s weird in a sickeningly deliberate way.

Christ starts in Bridget Jones mode, chain-smoking through a mid-life crisis and whining about how difficult it is to get a date these days. There’s trouble with the landlord and a desperate attempt to turn water into wine and it’s all very funny for fifty per cent of the five-strong audience but nobody’s really sure what the point is.

The only conceivable point is that this is a deceptive façade for the play’s second movement, a work rotting with self-satisfaction that seems to serve only as a showcase for a meaningless poem which the author is clearly very proud of; so proud of, in fact, that it’s printed on the back of the programme for us. If you didn’t realise it was bad first time round, it’s there in print for verification.

This is Jesus in unappreciated-artist mode, moaning about the world’s condition and capturing mankind’s follies in pastel: Auschwitz, Kosovo, Rwanda, the Gulf – for someone who’s been around two thousand years, his focus is a little too twentieth-century. Christ’s big worry though is the soon to come September 11: an unexplained part of the piece, which never seems to fit in beyond the level of a token.

The final part and third movement of the monologue is a Walt Disney-style plea for normality and the actress’s accent makes the Little Mermaid comparisons almost unavoidable. Jesus apparently ‘just wants to be understood’ and can’t get over the fact that mankind won’t co-operate with his plight. Perhaps what he needs is a slot on Women’s Hour.

Only the actress’s excellent performance redeems the material from being unendurable. Whoever the performer is (I can’t seem to work it out from the programme, which calls her a ‘philosophy buff’ who ‘doesn’t like hate-crimes’), she deserves credit for her enviable naturalism and perfect comic timing.

Fortunately, the show is very short and, for its slow half-hour, it does manage to sustain interest enough to make you feel that it is probably saving you from something worse: at least, in the safety of the Greyfriars Kirk House, you can’t be mauled, raped or run over, and, even in the palace of weariness, you can just about survive.

Run over.