Review – Agnes of God

Agnes of God quickly establishes its premise: a young nun is found in her quarters, bleeding and alone, having apparently murdered her new-born baby. Months later a psychiatrist, Dr. Martha Livingstone, is sent by the court to establish whether the nun is of sound mind. Under the watch of the mother superior the psychiatrist must investigate the angelic Agnes, and her claim that she has never been with child, but it quickly becomes obvious that the nun is not the only one withholding revelations.

The performances here were brilliant. There is a lot of heavy lifting facing the actors in this play: traumatic recollections, pointed arguments and painful admissions. All three women executed their roles perfectly, making their characters believable and relatable. This play has been produced many times, but I can’t imagine that its story has been better captured than it was by this cast.

But the story didn’t really work for me. Unless you’ve been living in a cave, or maybe a convent, you would know there are significant debates between the faithful and the rationalists. Agnes of God makes an admirable attempt to navigate these differences and find a neutral territory where both sides might meet eye-to-eye. But there is always a danger that the playwright might fall into one or another camp and betray the endeavour to their biases, and I think it’s readily obvious that this play favours the faithful. The psychiatrist gets in her early punches, taking the mother superior to task for her mistruths, but by the final act her convictions about Agnes have been proved wrong and she is left beaten on the ropes. This conceit doesn’t really work because there is more than one possibility for the psychiatrist to entertain and yet she wholly commits to only one. Otherwise, this is an excellent production of a play which thoroughly examines issues of faith and rationality in the modern world, and how Catholic women come to navigate them.