Sydney Reviews

A giant cross catwalk, a crucifix traverse, a crypt. Entering into KXT for a performance of Ruby Blinkhorn’s Cadaver Synod one wonders whether to genuflect or pull out a rosary. It’s a sepulchre splendid by designer Alice Vance.

Cadaver Synod is an historical play played hysterically, with a hail of histrionics, descending into high camp.

Based on a bizarre true story that beggars’ belief, it would take a master to carve compelling drama out of the labyrinthine arcana of state politics and Papal bull in the era before our AD centuries made double digits, and playwright Ruby Blinkhorn gives it a red hot go.

Pre-formaldehyde, former pope Formosus was exhumed and put on trial on charges of corruption while pontiff. The decomposing corpse was found guilty, defrocked and defingered and interred again, a preposterous posthumous prosecution brought by princes of the church and princes secular.

A surplus of surplice surrounds this scandal, a conspiracy of clergy led by an unscrupulous scheming sodomite, John, a cardinal sinner coveting the papal mitre. He’s the crook in the staff and he’s willing to swing a monstrous act as easy as swinging a monstrance.

Blind faith and rational belief are always sparring partners in dramatic conflict and so it is here with the power play tinged with superstition and salaciousness.

Set and Costumes by Alice Vance are splendid but the cardinal error of the play is the crushing generic banality.

Nat Jobe as Pope Stephen is the heavy head that wears the mitre, cursed with a crisis of faith, more in the Church than the Almighty, complete with the paranoia that has affected pontiffs past and present. Luke Fewster as John has sinister on simmer, which now and then boils over into vaudevillian villainy.

Leon Welsh plays Gabriel, as a doe eyed, dewy eyed naïve novice, jumping from the friar to to the firing line while Diego Retamales as Abraham, presents a scholar rather than a schemer, a book bound bore.

Mark Langham as Paul, the sage, wise and truly holy, entreats sympathy and empathy, honesty and moral stance. As the only female in this cloistered manosphere, Yasna Delo as Lucia, conjures a theatrical antecedent of Lucretia Borgia.