Speaking with too many tongues

Pentecost
By David Edgar
Directed by Rodney Fisher
Sydney Theatre Company
Wharf Theatre until February 24
Reviewed by Helen Jarvis Ambitious in theme and plot, Pentecost fails to realise its potential, leaving at least this reviewer with a sense of disappointment and disquiet. British playwright David Edgar, aiming to be "a secretary of our times", takes on real and important issues — nationalism, religion, honesty, socialism, loyalty, art, deception, ethnicity, suffering, pathos, duplicity, terror and love. Edgar develops a complex plot surrounding the authenticity and implications for art history of a medieval fresco recently uncovered in an abandoned church in a post-Stalinist eastern European country. Conservators and bureaucrats, priests from competing religions and expert art historians from England and the United States fight over the origins and the ownership of the painting. Suddenly, the backdrop moves to centre stage, as a motley group of refugees from many countries and cultures bursts into the church with a group of hostages in hand, seeking asylum in "Fortress Europe". At this point the play is fatally overloaded. The myriad characters, stories and issues compete and distract, and it never recovers the earlier dramatic tension. The playwrights's intention was fascinating: "a dialectic accepting the failure of the universal Communist utopia, but questioning whether the only alternative is a return to nationalism and fundamentalism". And perhaps his verbal adroitness, reminiscent of Stoppard, might have come through more strongly without the combination of heavy European accents and rapid fire delivery. But I fear any amount of actors' enthusiasm and director's finesse would not succeed. Even the dramatic outcome of the hostage drama and death of one of the play's main protagonists fails to move, and the heartfelt experiences of each of the refugees remain as remote and incomprehensible as the 30-second grab of evening television news.