Product World: Remix/What Would Judas Do? Bush Theatre London

The main link between these two short monologues, which can be seen separately, is the relative fame of their writers, Mark Ravenhill and Stewart Lee, and the novelty in seeing them ‘act’ – I use inverted commas because, in the event, only one them even gives that a proper go.

In ‘Product: World Remix’, Ravenhill plays a film executive pitching a story to a star actress. He’s a vile, lubricious sort of creature, given to aggrandisement and bullshit, and he’s very funny. The movie he is pitching, ‘Mohammed and Me’, is seven hacks’ attempt at representing the ideological conflict between the West and radical Islam while packing in a lot of sex and explosions. There’s a lot of fun satire on Western veniality, in the midst of which even the stunted diatribes of terrorist and lover Mohammed acquire a haunting persuasiveness. All good – even if it goes on a bit.

Stewart Lee’s ‘What Would Judas Do?’ on the other hand goes as quick as you like. The story of Judas as told by Judas, as a stand-up piece, it could be more joke-packed, and as a piece of theatre, it could have something more about it. Those expecting sacrilege will have little to rage at. Lee presents Judas as an everyday bloke, with Lee’s own bathetic approach and a nice line in audience participation. Like Tim Rice before him, he sees Judas as a revolutionary pragmatist who thought Jesus was going astray, and he gets good fun from analysing some of Christ’s sillier utterances.

Get into what Lee is actually trying to say and you find yourself a little lost. Lee doesn’t seem that interested in Judas himself: there’s no real idea, for example, of the fervour that leads him to suicide. Nor is there any hint of why it matters what Judas’s motivations were. In the end, I suppose, it works as a reminder that the things we’re liable to be told ’bout the Bible aren’t necessarily right. But I think we knew that.

Kieron Quirke , Mon Jan 15