A miracle, said Shaw, is an event that creates faith. And this brilliantly inventive South African version of the Chester mystery plays, imported from Cape Town's Spier festival, may convert even those sceptical theatrephobes who pervade the modern media.
One has to start with the plays themselves. Byron thought the mysteries "very profane productions". But I have often remarked how, even in a secularised society like ours, they appeal to a residual religious instinct. The Chester cycle is full of riches. The Noah story is a wonderfully comic study in domestic intransigence. And I would suggest that there are few more heart-stopping lines in English drama than Abraham's injunction to the boy Isaac he has been instructed to sacrifice: "Make thee ready, my darling, for we must do a little thing."
Here the plays - taken from Genesis and the New Testament and performed in a mixture of English, Afrikaans, Xhosa and Zulu - derive further power from the collective energy of the ensemble and the expressive use of everyday objects. God is raised aloft on criss-crossed wooden poles. Noah's flood is evoked by a cascading water sprinkler. A bale of straw stands for Bethlehem. This is the universal metaphorical language of theatre, but the company's South African origins lend the story a specific political resonance: a white Cain beats to death a black Abel and Christ is a threatening subversive brutally pummelled by sjambok-wielding riot police.
The show itself, however, is a symbol of intelligent racial cooperation. The cast bring to it their own particular skills; the director, Mark Dornford-May, and the music director, Broomhill Opera's Charles Hazelwood, have been the coordinators. What you get is an artful stylistic mix, above all in the music, where percussive oil drums and roof-raising a cappella choruses sit happily alongside medieval carols and even a post-flood rendering of You Are My Sunshine. In a large ensemble, there is a performance of massive dignity from Vumile Nomanyama who turns from a threatening Old Testament God into a beneficent, bejeaned Christ, and a very good one from Andries Mbali as a spring-heeled Lucifer filled with snickering, devilish pride. Played in rep with the same company's Carmen, this is an event that makes London theatre an infinitely brighter, better place and that quite simply raises the spirits.
In rep until June 30. Box office: 020-7420 0222.
