DOUBT: A PARABLE
DOUBT: A PARABLE, Sydney Theatre Company at the Roslyn Packer Theatre, 4 July-2 August 2026. Photography by Prudence Upton
John Patrick Shanley’s 2004 play Doubt: a Parable is encapsulated in WB Yeats’s enduring observation: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” In his program notes for this brilliant production, STC artistic director Mitchell Butel writes that, “…it is set in 1964 during a period of shifting tectonic plates of culture, religion and politics. And in 2026, the play feels incredibly reflective of the time we live in – a time in which what is real, what is artificial, what is true, what is fake, all seem harder to ascertain.”
All the above come to mind hours later, after the electrifying opening night performance, when the clarity of the production, the scintillating performances, and the visual pleasure of its staging linger to be savoured and revisited. And how, next morning, it’s impossible to shake the images and moments as the truths and importance of “doubt” continue to resonate.
The company of four is led by Pamela Rabe as the formidable Sister Aloysius, the head of St Nicholas Church School. Across the school yard is the priest’s house where young, charismatic Father Brendan Flynn (Sam Reid) is in the image of Vatican II, the thinking that would shake the Catholic Church out of conservative tradition into modernism, and is symbolised in the play by Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius.
By setting his play in 1964, however, Shanley focuses on something that is now an awful everyday given, but then was no more than whispers and, more often than not, shocked disbelief. Sister Aloysius suspects Father Flynn of improper behaviour towards the school’s sole Black pupil, Donald Muller. These suspicions are inadvertently raised by naive, well-meaning Sister James (Shannen Alyce Quan), and the results are inevitable and catastrophic. As Mrs Muller, the boy’s mother, Zindzi Okenyo is either the sole voice of reason, or the advocate for pragmatism, and is the warm centre of ordinary generosity.
In a series of confrontations, the emotional temperature and unfounded certainties collide and become combustible. The audience is presented with possibilities, probabilities, and head-spinning arguments for and against the accusation of abuse and the bigotry that fuels it. After the performance, the debates in the foyer were animated.
What’s not debatable is the calibre of the creative team: the set, by Bob Cousins, is a multi-faceted suggestion of an institutional building, all chilly angles and austere surfaces. There’s the church where Father Flynn opens with a sermon, there’s Sister Aloysius’s forbidding office, and the wintry garden with a bare tree and sack-protected shrubs. And all revealed to the audience in a mesmerising choreography of actors, a slow-moving revolve, and beautifully attuned lighting (Damien Cooper). The transitions between those scenes are accompanied by liturgical choral voices – the cast – from composer and sound designer Jessica Dunn. It goes without saying that STC’s resident voice coach, Charmian Gradwell, ensures the various accents, denoting class and origin, are seamless.
As the Christian Brothers return the Catholic Church to Australia’s headlines for all the usual wrong reasons, it’s hard to believe Doubt is twenty years on from its Pulitzer and Tony successes. Under the sure hand of director Marion Potts, it’s compelling and urgent, with the steadily building tension leavened by occasional flashes of humour. The actors, led by Rabe, who conveys unrelenting vehemence despite an all-enveloping black habit, are a headily accomplished unit of disparate humanity. The flaws of each person should serve to remind us that, at a time when rushing to judgment is the norm, the most humane thing is to have Doubt.
Not to be missed.
