Grace is a woman who is graceless in every way. A brilliant scientist, with more than a touch of Richard Dawkins about her, she has no God in her life, and is so fiercely intolerant of those who do that she's like a pan of milk that perpetually threatens to boil over. So when her lawyer son, Tom, announces his intention to become a priest and make a "better" religion, Grace sees it as a provocation.
Part of a series of plays dubbed "theatre essays", Mick Gordon and AC Grayling's On Religion begins as a dullish, schematic drama carefully laying out opposing views. Just when you think you'd like considerably less essay and a whole lot more theatre, it suddenly erupts into a desperate and desperately moving family drama that doesn't just pit faith against secularism and all the issues of tolerance and free speech that accompany that debate, but plunges into basic questions about what it means to be human and the appalling and glorious messiness of being alive.
Most of all, this is a play about passion in its very widest sense, why faith is different from belief, acts of kindness and inhumanity, and the importance of being wrong and admitting it. Perhaps the other characters are little more than foils in the real showdown between the strident Grace and the optimistic Tom, but the final half-hour is a reminder that both fundamentalism and love come in many hues.
· Until January 6. Box office: 0870 429 6883.
