Stage struck

Theatre is going to hell, writes Peter Crawley

Has the theatre recently taken a turn for the diabolical? In three separate plays the Devil has been hunted down, invoked through dark incantations, and has even made a personal appearance.

He's there in The Crucible, Arthur Miller's play about the witch hunts of 1690s American as an elusive but unquestioned presence. "We cannot look to superstition in this," says a character who comes closest to sober reason. "The Devil is precise."

He's there again in Mark O'Rowe's fantastic new play Terminus, in which he is described in verse as an actual entity stalking Dublin who

grants the power of song in exchange for someone's soul -

a Mephistopheles with a music contract. "The Devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape," worried Hamlet, but in O'Rowe's play it is a form composed of wriggling masses of worms.

Only Sean McLoughlin, in his recent play End-Time, has been daring enough to give the Devil a real entrance - and a shape to boggle the mind - but more on that later.

Interestingly, deities rarely

get a look-in these days; their stage appearances are largely confined to nativity pageants, Jesus Christ Superstar and poorly resolved Greek plays. When they do appear, it can lead to protests and even death threats, as the makers of Jerry Springer: The Opera discovered.

With Beelzebub, you're on much safer ground. After all, who could take idea of the Devil seriously?

"The Devil is a puzzling but real, personal and not merely symbolic presence." That may sound like another line from The Crucible, but they're actually the words of Cardinal Ratzinger, who has since been promoted. Pope Benedict XVI also recently affirmed the existence of Hell. Yet I doubt he'd approve of the recent theatrical attention paid to evil incarnate.

Now don't get me wrong; nobody is suggesting that Miller, O'Rowe or McLoughlin is spreading a dark message or encouraging Devil worship (although, like so many Judas Priest records, we can't know for sure until we see these plays performed backwards). The point is that, in works from Paradise Lost to The Omen, writers have more liberty (and much more fun) with the anti-hero. Or, to put it another way, if God seems inscrutable, it's better the Devil you know.

What was so recognisable in Sean McLoughlin's trippy End-Time, whose run has sadly concluded, was a world where religious iconography owed more to eBay than to the Book of Revelations, where the Virgin Mary was more likely to appear on a grilled cheese sandwich than in a church.

McLoughlin furthered the idea, in a hilarious conceit, with an antichrist that hath powers to assume the shape of Bosco, the fallen idol of many an Irish childhood. That symbolic presence says a lot about these spiritually and culturally chaotic times, where God is dead and the Devil is in the details.