Doubt, A Parable

John Patrick Shanley’s masterpiece is one of the most acclaimed plays in recent memory. Winning 4 Tony Awards including Best Play, named Best Play by the New York Drama Critics’ Circle, Best New Play (Drama Desk Awards) and Outstanding Play (Lucille Lortel Awards). Doubt, A Parable won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

The subsequent Hollywood film starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams and Viola Davis, received 4 Oscar and 3 BAFTA nominations.

Now Doubt, A Parable, in which a Catholic school principal questions a priest’s ambiguous relationship with a troubled young student, is to get its first London revival in 10 years.

“What do you do when you’re not sure?” So asks Father Flynn, the progressive and beloved priest at the St. Nicholas Church School in the Bronx, in his sermon. It’s 1964, and things are changing, to the chagrin of rigid principal Sister Aloysius. However, when an unconscionable accusation is levelled against the Father, Sister Aloysius realises that the only way to get justice is to create it herself. And as for the truth of the matter? As Father Flynn says, “Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty.”

In stunning prose, John Patrick Shanley delves into the murky shadows of moral certainty, his characters always balancing on the thin line between truth and consequences.