On screen, writer Anthony McCarten turns stories about real, complex figures – Stephen Hawking, Freddie Mercury, Winston Churchill – into tidily packaged entertainments. He does the same in this 2019 play about the resignation of the traditionalist Bavarian Pope Benedict XVI in 2013 and his replacement by the “liberal” Argentine Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now Pope Francis.
It’s an old-fashioned piece of work, a vehicle for two veteran actors to barnstorm through issues of passion and principle, which promises to lift the veil of the Vatican’s arcane secrecy while actually doing no such thing. The history of the papacy and its contemporary problems are parcelled into two neat acts of an hour each, the script’s emotional peaks and comic moments precisely calibrated to elicit a response, like “amens” in a sermon.
