The Gospel of Matthew
C, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Group: George Dillon's Vital Theatre

Dolan Cummings

It's ambitious, I'll give it that. A new version of everyone's second favourite gospel, presented by a single performer to a Fringe audience hardly ripe for conversion.

Now, the Good News is still gripping enough to occupy even an atheist for an hour and a half, and the production makes use of a projected timeline to emphasise Matthew's rooting of the story in Jewish history, which is interesting too. But once you've got past George Dillon's costume, which resembles a sleeveless but hooded radiation suit, it's the language that distracts you from the story.

It's all very well to freshen up the gospels, but with passages and phrases as deeply ingrained in the popular consciousness as these, it's hard to avoid comparing Dillon's new version with the old. The 'Thou shalt not's become 'No killing, no adultery' etc - well, kind of, but it lacks that direct imperative quality that is surely the whole point. And Dillon tries to make up for the flatness of his revised Lord's Prayer with a dramatic emphasis that is the one almost embarrassing moment in the performance.

The sermon on the mount works better, as Dillon gives himself space to bring the words to life, but overall the new text is summed up by the simply inadequate 'Why have you left me?' in place of 'Why hast thou forsaken me?'. No - it just doesn't mean the same thing.

Nonetheless, the performance is engaging throughout, and even if the disciples are made to sound like refugees from one of the five productions of Bouncers at this year's Fringe, this is good stuff.

I promised myself I wouldn't wheel out the old trope about new versions sending people back to the original text, but it wouldn't surprise me if James Thin's round the corner from C shifted a few copies of the Good Book this month.

30 July to 24 August.

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