His Majesty, the Devil - a Play With Music

In The Usual Suspects, Kevin Spacey utters the film’s most immortal piece of theology: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince the world he didn’t exist.”

On the evidence of His Majesty, the Devil..., Satan seems to be ruing that sleight of hand.

Fresh from New York, The Elsewhere Ensemble offer up a Lucifer down on his luck. No fangs, horns and stench of sulphur here. This Devil is a slightly buffoonish figure, an aged dandy with Bill Nighy affectations, and a rather insufferable flatmate.

His work, he explains to a young man about to commit an atrocity, is being carried out perfectly well by humans. He is redundant, spending his days making cakes, riding his bike, and longing for a simple life as a farmer’s wife.

A bumbling, unemployed Satan is an interesting concept, there is a nice tension over whether the Devil is real or a figment of the terrorist’s mind, and the live violin-playing adds a gothic air to events. But for a play that explores cosmic questions about God, human suffering and the nature of justice, it is strangely inert. These themes squat on proceedings rather than drive them forward.

It is not helped by the terrorist’s occasionally hammy acting and the script’s bouts of overwrought dialogue.

Ultimately, His Majesty, the Devil... conjours up another famous adage about The Nefarious. In the 1960s, political theorist Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil.” Sadly, this is a play about the Prince of Darkness at his most beige.