REVIEW: A (kind of) Restoration Comedy – Behold! The Monkey Jesus at Brockley Jack 20 June – 8 July

‘A play that asks what art is, and whether it is possible to achieve truth in art’ ★★★ ½

 The early modern essayist Francis Bacon suggests that people don’t really care about truth – in fact, that they actively love lies because they need them for their self-esteem: “Doth any man doubt that if there were taken out of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves?” Or, in the words of this play, you would have to face the fact that you had created a “howling swede” when you thought you had restored the face of Jesus. This play by Joe Wiltshire Smith at the Brockley Jack is many things at once. It’s a farce about Cecilia Giménez’s ill-fated attempt at the restoration of a painting of Jesus. It’s a reflection on the Catholic Church’s role as patron of the arts. And, perhaps most promisingly but least satisfyingly, it is a play that asks what art is, and whether it is possible to achieve truth in art.

 How you feel about this play probably depends on how you greet the joke, “it’s 2012, the year of our Lorde – with an E!”. A lot of the humour didn’t entirely work for me, but it was clearly working for other people in the audience. The funniest moment in the play was the unveiling of the titular “Monkey Christ,” the painting that, as one character put it, looked like a skinned cat pinned to the wall (“but in a good way?” asked Giménez, still deluded). It’s not clear from the program who designed this painting, but they deserve a lot of praise. It’s not quite Giménez’s real painting; the mouth has been moved a little to the left, distorting Jesus’s face even further. This is a very clever move in a play that circles around the idea of truth in art and the possibility of representing anything or anyone accurately.

 But for some reason, around the time of the revelation of the painting, it feels like the play runs out of steam. We get bogged down in matters of money management – who’s profiting from the sale of keychains? – and the question of whether Giménez should feel guilty for ruining the painting. We’re told that the painting becomes the first viral phenomenon, but the internet is otherwise absent from the play except as a source of money and fame. The jokes slow down. On one level, I appreciate the play’s attempt to veer from a farce about an inept painter to a reflection on who owns art and truth. But it didn’t feel to me that the play had very clear answers, or even compellingly complicated questions, to offer. A late revelation about who the narrator was and in what context their narration was happening didn’t land, because it didn’t fit with the actual tone or content of the narration. The parallel I kept thinking about was Stephen Sondheim’s and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George, a musical whose first half is about a struggling artist and second half about the reception of his work and his great-grandson’s own artistic career, all in the service of a point about what you need to give up in order to make great art and what the rewards may or may not be. Monkey Jesus feels like it sets itself up to reflect on a really complicated version of this question: how do we know that a work that is universally ridiculed isn’t a masterpiece? It anticipates this by depicting the original creator of the fresco’s own struggles with critics. But the play doesn’t quite carry this point through to the end.

 In the first half of “Monkey Jesus” the tension is built very effectively around whether Giménez will accede to what she thinks is the voice of Jesus and her own artistic desires and restore the fresco, while the second half is mostly centred around whether Giménez will be paid adequately for her work and how she feels about her creation, factors that are presented as more important than whether her work is appreciated in the way it was intended – but also far less exciting questions, and ones that makes her feel less active as a character and the play less focused in its outlook.

I did appreciate the play’s willingness to look beyond the punchlines to defend Giménez’s artistic creation. The final scene was pleasingly outrageous. And the cast was fantastic. All three performers, Louise Beresford, Roger Parkins, and Mary Tillett, veered from the comic to the tragic with ease. This was a really thought-provoking play, and a very enjoyable one. As mentioned above, this play is several things at once. It’s a four-star farce and a three-star play of ideas. As the play itself argues, the more imperfect something is, the more genuine it feels.

The photographer credit is Steve Gregson.

A (kind of) Restoration Comedy – Behold! The Monkey Jesus, written by Joe Wiltshire Smith, produced by Organised Fun, https://brockleyjack.co.uk/jackstudio-entry/behold-the-monkey-jesus/

Writer: Joe Wiltshire Smith

Director: Scott Le Crass

Cast: Louise Beresford, Roger Parkins, Mary Tillett

Produced by: Organised Fun

Reviewer Clio Doyle is a playwright and university lecturer.