Jonathan Harvey’s new play could make even the least pious nun clutch her rosary beads; it’s overflowing with enough innuendo to trigger a biblical plague. Instead of springing out of the dialogue with wit and surprise, it comes bounding up to clobber us over the head. “My rusty gates are wide open,” declares one character. “Just make sure your legs aren’t,” adds another, just to be sure.
It also has enough plot to fill a testament or two. When Sister Petra Pottymouth decides to locate her long-lost twin sister, Eileen, she finds her in prison for a crime she didn’t commit. Eileen’s husband’s twin brother, Ziggy, let her take the fall, and is now on the trail of the gold their father stole from the convent and hid with a riddle. Petra plans a heist with her friend, Sister Fionola Foghorn (Keddy Sutton in the slow sidekick role), to extract a confession and reclaim the loot.
Sisters of Mersey robs itself of comedy, however, by making the nuns so rowdy and foul-mouthed that, when they leave the convent, there’s no sense of a bracing confrontation with the outside world. Lindzi Germain’s Sister Petra is enjoyably feisty and boisterous, but never shows fish-out-of-water awkwardness. Nor does Germain differentiate Petra enough from her other role as the gruff Eileen, so when Petra tries to pass as Eileen to her family, there’s little comic struggle in the impersonation.
The set makes a better attempt to suggest the collision of worlds. Wood and stained glass swing in and out of a wraparound map that resembles a digital surveillance interface. A frame switches between a spire-like point and a white prison cell.
A live band (in dog collars) provides lively, thematically linked 1980s pop hits. Livin’ on a Prayer amusingly flips from a rock start to choral solemnity. But then Come on Eileen is used for Gabriel Fleary’s cockney villain, Ziggy, to thrust at, spanking and browbeating Sister Petra into accepting his advances. Other sequences see the nuns parading giant bronze phalluses. There are too many such unrepentantly lowbrow moments, requiring a saintly capacity for forgiveness.
