"Nuns fret not," wrote Wordsworth "at their convent's narrow room." You'd never guess that, however, from looking at the current London stage. Hot on the heels of The Sound of Music comes this chamber-musical about Sister Wendy Beckett, who gained TV fame through her belief that "art belongs to everyone". While Sister Wendy is studiously unmocked, however, she also remains signally enigmatic.
The book, by Marcus Reeves and Beccy Smith, gives us only the skimpiest biographical outline. We gather that Sister Wendy was born in South Africa, taught for 16 years and then retreated to a monastery, where she devoted herself to medieval scripts and art history. Deriving her knowledge of art from books and postcards, she was propelled into TV stardom in the 1990s and whisked around the globe to proselytise about paintings. Today, she has apparently returned to a meditative life in East Anglia.
You might expect a musical on such a subject to explore the conflict between contemplation and celebrity. If you have a vocation for solitude, how do you cope with global recognition? But, according to this show, Sister Wendy sailed through a life-changing experience with indefatigable cheeriness. We see her rhapsodising about paintings in the Uffizi and the Louvre, coping with intrusive talk-show hosts and remaining totally unsullied. Her strength, she lyrically informs us, comes from the fact she is "lit up by the wonder of the beauty of God's art".
That may make her an admirable human being; it doesn't, however, make her a very dynamic dramatic heroine. Nor do Marcus Reeves's music and lyrics offer much in the way of illumination. There is a mild stab at satire when an Oprah-style chat-show host sings: "It's like a new religion/ Preaching through your television." But the songs are so busy endorsing Sister Wendy's point of view that "the outside world is vastly overrated" that they offer nothing in the way of secular temptation.
The whole thing is put across by a five-strong cast with a hectic heartiness. Myra Sands makes you believe in the sincerity of Sister Wendy's devotional calling, and Juliet Gough provides a few moments of light relief as a brisk TV producer and a celebrity-worshipping chat-show merchant. But it all makes for a very etiolated nun's tale, and over Omar F Okai's rudimentary staging it would be polite to draw an impenetrable veil.
· Until February 3. Box office: 020-7287 2875.
