Douglas Maxwell’s monologue was inspired, according to the author’s note in the programme, by a real story. It is set in a London primary school, on the day in which a little Somali girl is going to be exorcised in front of her classmates to cure her ‘elective’ mutism,: the ceremony is to be performed by ‘a community leader and some others’ - but only if Maggie Brodie, the officially retired, temporary substitute teacher, does not slay the politically correct dragon and save the day.

Given these plot premises, when I entered the Soho theatre and saw Lisa Sangster’s set, I started to worry: on the wall of the classroom, in a series of brightly-coloured everyday words with respective illustrations, the central sequence went: ‘GIRL - FAITH - CAGE’. This, it seemed, would not be a play for the subtly hearted. Fortunately, it turns out that Promises Promises is not at all a play about an issue, nor a tirade against the follies of dumbed-down multiculturalism. Instead, it is a voyage to the centre of Miss Brodie, which moves swiftly and masterfully from comedy to gothic horror story, passing through Miss Brodie’s projection into six-year-old Rosie (or Nadifa), with a definite touch of doppelgänger motives.

Obviously, there is still no escaping the topic at hand: Maggie, in many ways a liberated and progressive middle-aged woman, is being patronized by her much younger headmaster and by a social services officer (whose infantilising tone is fantastically rendered by Joanna Tope in her own one-woman show), mostly in the name of Tolerance. She is furious when she is told she has to put up and even welcome the ritual that will be performed in her class, enraged at this ‘mob of good intentions rampaging, destroying everything in its wake’. Because she is so funny, and because she seems to stand for common sense, and because of course she is the beguiling narrator of this story, we are naturally drawn to take her side.

But Maggie is also a biased, if not altogether unreliable, narrator, and she is someone with a very dark past; in her shiny red shoes, the same colour as Rosie’s, she is on a mission to make things right again, very much like an older Dorothy lost in the absurdities of the Kingdom of Oz - but she is also just as ambiguous as Dorothy, and as confused by her options. Slowly, we find out that this rage in front of her own impotence was not born in this occasion; that she often drinks too much and in fact sounds very much like an alcoholic; that her sister was taken away from her by their father and put into a convent, and that she thus has more than one reason to hate religions. Even her free attitude to sex, the power she keeps telling us she has on men because of the way she walks and the way she touches them, eventually becomes entangled in her more shadowy traits. Joanna Tope delivers Maggie’s sophisticated and twisted personality as it unfolds, without spoiling the surprise too early, and without drowning her in malice or lunacy later on. Maggie’s bond with Rosie, immediately resulting in the child literally following in her footsteps and imitating her gait, is the reason why Rosie shares her terrible secret only with Maggie: not because the latter is the only adult she can trust, but because she recognises in Maggie someone who will, at all costs and with all means, keep her promises.

Rosie being incarnated as never more than a silhouette of light, or a few red footsteps on the floor, reinforces both the uncanny quality of the play’s style and direction, and the indignation-inducing foundations of the plot, with momentous references to childhood torture in a synthetically staged girls’ bathroom. Karen McIver’s music provides a traditionally gothic soundtrack, highlighting the arabesques of words and blood, and Tope seems to control even the amount of gleaming in her eyes, ensuring it is in tune with the pace of the play. Maggie is, perhaps, the one who is really possessed by demons, but thankfully, nothing is quite that clear-cut: Maxwell still keeps his protagonist believable, so that we cannot dismiss either the depth of her misery or the full-scale horror of the episode of which she is protagonist. Maggie and Rosie ‘s stories are equally difficult to forget.

Till 13 March 2010