THE SECRET RAPTURE
David Hare’s The Secret Rapture doesn’t look much at all like Stead’s Christ. Set in modern London and laid out like a modish melodrama, detailing the love lives and work loads of two sisters and their alcoholic, newly widowed stepmother, The Secret Rapture would seem to owe more to Terence Rattigan than to Saint Mark. But the two works are conceptual kin. Hare’s premise is like Stead’s, adjusted for time and place and satirical thrust: what if Christ came back to visit Margaret Thatcher’s London? In the case of The Secret Rapture, though, you can’t imagine what it’s like.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Linda Emond, on the other hand, misses that balance somewhat. Especially in the tents created for her by costume designer Erin Quigley, Emond’s Isobel seems too self-consciously deep, too much of another world, when the main virtue of Hare’s character is her human ambivalence, her flakiness, and her occasional cruelty.
