How Sister Juana struck a blow for the sisterhood: The Heresy Of Love is bookish but beefy

By Patrick Marmion for the Daily Mail

Published: 19:59 EST, 6 August 2015 | Updated: 07:29 EST, 7 August 2015

The Heresy of Love (Shakespeare Globe)

Verdict: Bookish but beefy 

Rating:

This is an impressive revival of a highly intelligent play that does a great deal to break down the all too predictable opposition between religious practice and liberal freedom.

If that sounds dry and cerebral, then it’s worth remembering that no play that’s not also broad and theatrical can survive in the cauldron of Shakespeare’s Globe.

And Helen Edmundson’s play, first seen at the RSC in Stratford three years ago, doesn’t just survive: it thrives.

Sophia Nomvete (Juanita) and Naomi Frederick (Juana) in The Heresy Of Love by Helen Edmundson

Sophia Nomvete (Juanita) and Naomi Frederick (Juana) in The Heresy Of Love by Helen Edmundson

Her subject is 17th century Mexican nun, Sister Juana. As well as being a devout member of her convent she was a poet and dramatist. In that era of the Spanish inquisition, Juana risked being branded a heretic in her writing, but there was also the question of being marginalised as a woman.

Actress Naomi Frederick is exceptional in the role. At first radiant and a peace-maker in her vocation as a nun and writer, she is fierce in her fight to retain both when her writing comes under threat from her archbishop.

She is a fascinating woman of the mind, flesh and cloth. When she is shorn of hair, habit and dignity late on, it is moving and shocking.

John Dove’s finely judged production never loses sight of the vigorous, sometimes comic human relations around her.

There is warm comedy from Gwyneth Keyworth as the excitable young novice who falls for Gary Shelford’s corpulent lothario. Even bigger laughs are won by Sophia Nomvete as Juana’s maid: a woman of lusty appetite and blunt speech.

It is in the end a parable of women’s struggle for equality through education, but on the way it touches on no less complex or important issues of moral, cultural and spiritual freedoms. Terrific.

A PIG HIT! THE THREE LITTLE PIGS (CAMBRIDGE THEATRE, LONDON)

Verdict: Sweet cured bacon

Rating:

Here's a short and tasty children’s musical with a twist in the tail. The twist is that it’s a light rap version, by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe, of the classical fairy story. 

Camped out on the front of the Palace Theatre by day where The Commitments is playing by night, the little pigs in outsize porker costumes have to leave home because Mum says it’s a pigsty.

The big bad wolf takes advantage of their architectural follies and there are nice Disneyish tunes including the memorable A Little House and the Bluesy anthem Blow Your House Down. 

There’s an amusingly hammy turn from Blue boy band star Simon Webbe as an Elvis-like wolf who’s a handsome charmer with a glorious bass chuckle.

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