THEATER: Anglican Woe

Remember the theater of ideas, in which characters represented (and debated) their convictions about public issues instead of whimpering about their private demons? Remember the Church of England, which retains its power to make randy royals miserable but has apparently lost its ability to comfort and inspire ordinary parishioners?

Playwright David Hare does. And in Racing Demon, which is visiting Los Angeles in a Royal National Theatreproduction, unfashionable form and seemingly distant subject matter are suddenly made vividly relevant. At the center of Richard Eyre's dark, stark yet ever bustling production stands (or rather slumps) the weary figure of the Rev. Lionel Espy (Oliver Ford Davies), a man who has lost not only religious faith but also the consolations of secular humanism with which he has been making do. To the political right and above him is his bishop (Richard Pasco), also faithless but fiercely insistent that his priests honor tradition. Below and to the left of Espy is young Tony Ferris (Adam Kotz), in whom ambition and evangelical zealotry are so dangerously, neurotically mixed. As pastor of a dwindling and dissatisfied slum parish, Espy can find no useful support among colleagues whose responses to the modern spiritual crisis range from inane denial to tormented atheism.

Hare has granted all his characters humanizing histories and eccentricities; his actors, particularly Davies and Kotz, respond with richly wayward performances, and his play transcends its -- as it were -- parochial subject matter. Without resorting to gaseous big-think, Racing Demon is a sharp-edged, metaphorical study of the way confused institutions and their loyalists befuddle and betray one another in the age of ambiguity.