Reviews provided by Syndetics

Kirkus Book Review

A thorough, perceptive, but almost terminally disorganized survey. Nichols is a long-time Rome correspondent for the London Times and deeply familiar with the intricacies of Vatican politics. He's followed the globetrotting John Paul II everywhere and has a sophisticated grasp of the many national varieties of Catholicism--American, Irish, Filipino, etc. An agnostic Anglican and a fair-minded liberal, he brings a nice blend of sympathy and critical detachment to his scrutiny of the institution that, as he stresses, binds together almost a fifth of the human race. So far, so good. But Nichols refuses to stick to the straightforward journalistic task he's so superbly equipped for. For one thing, he lets his (perfectly honorable) concern over various global crises--poverty, the arms race, runaway urbanization in the Third World--sidetrack him from the subject at hand. Granting the relevance of all this to a Church that claims to be universal, one gets the impression nonetheless that Nichols would rather discuss the gulf between the industrial North and the hungry South than, say, the humbler, day-to-day ""churchy"" realities of Catholic life. More serious than this imbalance, though, is Nichols' propensity for hopping all over the place. A chapter ostensibly about Fatima meanders through remarks on the origin of Pentecostalism, Bishop Hilarion Capucci and his undercover work for the PLO, quarrels between Armenians and Syrian Jacobites for ownership of the chapel of St. Nicodemus, etc. Still, despite the structural muddle, Nichols does have a clear thesis: while in some ways a reactionary anachronism (unrealistic sexual ethics, bureaucratic stiffening-of-the-joints), the Church could be, especially in Latin America, the cutting edge of a drive for justice and human dignity. And Nichols gives us a rich sampling of anecdotes, statistics, and shrewd observations that, if nothing else, cast some ironic light on Stalin's famous jibe. Flawed but intelligent. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

A Bristol-born former actor and schoolteacher, Peter Nichols was born on July 31, 1927. He got his start writing some 14 plays for television and has continued to write for that medium even since attaining success in the West End. A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, his first stage play, was produced in England in 1967 and on Broadway a year later. Joe Egg (as a squeamish American management insisted it be retitled) concerns a couple whose marriage is slowly being destroyed by their attempt to raise a hopelessly spastic daughter (Josephine, alias Joe Egg, their "living parsnip"). They survive in their situation as long as they do only by ceaselessly joking about it.

This comic distancing, as much as its autobiographical revelation, was to be the common characteristic of Nichols's later plays. Forget-Me-Not-Lane (1971), distinctly personal in its middle-aged re-examination of a World War II childhood, has characters stepping back and forth through time and in and out of the dramatic situation. In Passion Play (1981), Nichols's characters even break away from themselves, each partner in a bickering couple splitting into mutually critical components. The National Health (1969), produced to general acclaim at the National Theatre, achieves its distancing through the alternation of realistic scenes of suffering and dying in a hospital ward with episodes of an outrageous medical soap opera, Nurse Norton's Affair, shown on a simulated television screen. And in the ironic musical episodes of Privates on Parade (1977), the story of an army entertainment troupe in the 1950s, Nichols entered the area of alienating theatricalism explored by John Osborne's The Entertainer (1957) and Joan Littlewood's Oh, What a Lovely War. Privates, a Royal Shakespeare Company hit of 1977, has been made into a film, as have Joe Egg and The National Health. (Nichols also wrote the screenplay for the 1966 film satire Georgy Girl.)

(Bowker Author Biography)