HEADLONG

Of all the strange meetings that could be dreamed into theatrical life, or afterlife, would many be more worth witnessing than Jesus’s first close encounter since the crucifixion with Judas Iscariot, who killed himself after his betrayal of the Messiah? Just such a scene, rivetingly imagined, brings this extraordinary religious fantasy, by that promising American playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis, to a close and a consummation.

The black and sometimes divinely amusing comedy, a court-room drama, which seeks to exonerate Iscariot from being consigned to hell, is far from being a straight, serious piece of religious pleading. With a cast of predominantly American characters that includes Douglas Henshall’s cool, suave Satan, showing off black Gucci and a stylish white jacket, Sigmund Freud pronouncing on Judas's unbalanced state of mind and being mocked for his cocaine habit and Ron Cephas Jones's elegant but depraved Pontius Pilate, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot boasts some of the satirical spirit of Jerry Springer - the Soap Opera... Despite his refusal to treat Christianity with conventional reverence and his use of TV dramatics for the Case of God, Heaven and Earth against Judas, Guirgis embarks on a deadly serious mission. He poses hard questions about how a merciful God can create hell and withhold forgiveness; how Judas, the closest of disciples, came to betray and whether he can be held responsible for Jesus’s crucifixion... there is no missing how Joseph Mawle’s astonishingly fine Judas electrifies the stage with his grief-stricken sense of fury and his strange conviction he was betrayed by the Jesus he worshipped, loved and lost. I cannot recall a young actor whipping up such an intense emotional storm. Guirgis gives theology a dramatic edge - even for agnostics.

Sex and politics are common. But religion has become taboo in modern drama. It returns, wittily and exuberantly, in this play by Stephen Adly Guirgis, first seen at New York's Public Theatre in 2005 and here in a production by Rupert Goold, who won every award going for his Macbeth.

Guirgis's setting is downtown Purgatory where everyone speaks American argot. And his play takes the form of a courtroom drama in which an appeal is being launched against Judas Iscariot's damnation to hell. God's perfect love is pitted against His rightful justice: the spirit of the New Testament against the Old. On the one hand, we are told that Judas, played by Joseph Mawles, was Jesus's alter ego and an instrument of his divine mission: on the other that Judas was an impossibly arrogant figure who made God in his own image. These are matters rarely debated on the London stage; and Goold's production gives full weight to Guirgis's rich text. Anthony Ward's design surrounds the action with a circular screen full of technicolour urban images.

The performances are also high-octane. Mark Lockyer as the Egyptian prosecutor is all flighty jokiness while Susan Lynch endows his opponent with a mixture of fury and despair. Douglas Henshall also makes a suitably sensational appearance as a cool Satan. It is a gloriously intoxicating brew that, in its fantasy and daring, reminds me of Tony Kushner's equally high-flying Angels in America.