The Heresy of Love, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

"I hear the nun is writing once again." There, in one line, is the entire essence of Helen Edmundson's play. It contains the biographical subject: 17th-century Mexican nun, poet and playwright Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. It contains the linguistic form: the published playscript is not laid out in verse, but the iambs toll with sonorous regularity throughout, with many a perfect pentameter such as this one. Above all it contains the theme of the evening: Sister Juana's struggle with the church authorities who disliked her for writing secular material but principally for being an intelligent, articulate woman. Of course there is more to it: some three hours more in volume but not really much more in weight.

The work has a number of strikes against it. Most obviously, it is far too late to capitalise on the success of the Royal Shakespeare Company's staging of Sor Juana's House of Desires in its Spanish Golden Age season in 2004-5. Without this hook, it needs to succeed on its own terms. Alas, it falls squarely into the worthy genre of "independent woman squashed by the patriarchy" dramas, and there is perhaps no more definitive patriarchy than the Catholic Church, especially in Spain (or rather New Spain, as Mexico was then called) during the Inquisition. Sister Juana's innocent novice niece is played for a pawn in the power-tussle between state and church, and Juana herself is betrayed by a temporising bishop who switches sides to ally himself with his puritanical, ice-blooded archbishop superior. And so on.

There is intelligence aplenty in the play, but it is all displayed statically rather than brought to life. Sister Juana's clever theological rebuttal of a sermon of the archbishop's has none of the sense of high stakes that, for instance, ran through David Edgar's play about the King James Bible, Written on the Heart, on this stage just a few months ago. Director Nancy Meckler gives things a coherent but formal staging, devoid of the exuberance she brought to House of Desires. What should be the climactic confrontation between nun and archbishop (who, unsubtly, will not even look at her) is in fact the least organic, most predictable part of the evening. Catherine McCormack, Stephen Boxer, Geoffrey Beevers, Raymond Coulthard and Dona Croll are among the actors giving more than the play deserves.

www.rsc.org.uk

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