“It’s a heavy book…a grim read.” That’s how a couple of unidentified respondents describe the Holy Bible in this performance free-for-all through the pages of both Testaments. 

A work devised around word-for-word recollections by 21 people who were interviewed about the Bible and religion, The Good News is far from being heavy, or grim.

On an open stage, apart from a couple of plastic toy boxes, three young performers – Amy Griffin-Browne, Harriet Hughes and James Cain – deliver the transcripts of the Bible‘s “non-Hollywood narrative structure” beginning with “In the beginning” and working their way through to ‘Revelation’. 

God – complete with masquerade stick-mask beard – Adam and Eve and Lilith; the flood, courtesy of a water pistol and animal toys; confusion between Noah and Moses; the number 40; Abraham and Isaac, with Isaac somehow becoming Joseph’s dad in the coat of many colours tale. Is Moses Christian Bale or Russell Crowe? No matter, the plague of locusts is rendered using a couple of released partially-inflated fluttering balloons. Clever. 

David and Goliath, Elijah and Elisha, Job, King Solomon as Jay-Z, Jonah and the whale all whizz by – then all of a sudden, Jesus, John the Baptist, Zaccheus, the last supper, the Resurrection and the multi-headed creatures of ‘Revelation’, while managing to reference Rugrats and The Simpsons.

It’s as if the Ugly Shakespeare Company had decided to tackle the iconic tome. And it’s a well-honed, well-juggled and amusing hour and a quarter presentation, with the performers at pace sensitively capturing and relaying the nuances and speech patterns of the transcript respondents in all their sincerest biblical uncertainty.

Censorship did apply apparently, to the more profane expressions during the performance delivered at Feilding’s St John the Evangelist Church, but apart from that, this misremembered re-expression of the Good Book takes place verbatim.

Its fluency says plenty for the curation and arrangement of the interviews, and for the skill of the actors who capture both the chaotic and the coherent without missing a beat.

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I have to admit, I was a little nervous about attending The Good News. I’d been led to believe it was going to involve humorous re-tellings of bible stories but part of me was a little worried that it might actually be a stealth attack on the BATS audience by an overly-earnest Church Youth Group. My fears weren’t allayed by the three actors’ brightly coloured polo shirts, the wardrobe choice of ever smiling Bible Class leaders everywhere. Should I have brushed up on the lyrics to ‘Kumbayah’ before I arrived? 

Luckily there’s no group sing-a-long in The Good News and it’s only a religious show in that the subject matter is religion. The polo shirts are a red herring and the three energetic performers – Amy Griffin-Browne, Harriet Hughes and James Cain – take us through some rather bizarre and wonderful re-workings of bible stories, utilising a fine supporting cast of stuffed toys and some rather fetching false beards.  

Show curators Adam Goodall and Johnny Crawford asked people to tell them their version of bible stories and in The Good News, present them verbatim. They’re not quite how you remember from Sunday School but definitely more entertaining. 

Elijah and Elisha the Prophets are violent bad-arses, everyone gets Noah and Moses mixed up and Satan is gangsta like Jay-Z. By interspersing the bible stories with vignettes on the subjects of belief and religion, Goodall and Crawford offer a more thoughtful take than expected and the re-tellings reveal more about the inherent ridiculousness of the stories than any snide commentary could. 

The initial blistering pace of the show sometimes makes it difficult to tell which cast member is playing which character. This seems to settle as the show goes on, with the three actors working seamlessly as an ensemble. They successfully kept it tight and pacy right to the end without sacrificing any of the emotion of the quieter portions of the show. Certainly, it never feels like my interest is flagging. 

The Good News will certainly ring a few bells for anyone who has ever been held captive in a Sunday School class as well as those who have willingly dabbled in the ways of the Lord. I for one am intrigued enough by some of the stories to want to investigate them further. I’ll probably use Wikipedia and not The Bible though. After all, as a character in The Good News says, “I tried to read the Bible once and didn’t get very far. It’s a grim read!” That’s fair warning, indeed!

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