Passion Play, the new Peter Nichols at the Aldwych, is hardly concerned about expense. There are nine non-speaking parts plus two actors for each of the main characters. It was not enough to have Billie Whitelaw as the heroine – there must be Billie Whitelaw plus Eileen Atkins. The former introduces us to the character in her external mode: the intelligent capable and attractive woman of a certain age, the fulfilled wife whose children have left home and who looks forward to a period of privacy and calm. She dislikes bitterness and when she tries to argue with a friend whose husband has deserted her for a younger woman, we see this as a sign of her maturity and wisdom. One should not live in the past. The deserted wife should create a new life for herself. This seems like common sense.

But there is a fault in this wisdom and sense, a fault which is the author’s ironic business to expose. Miss Whitelaw is so extremely handsome and capable-seeming (although an inadvertent stridency and vocal monotony in the first scene struck me as a defect in her performance) that one can hardly imagine her as vulnerable. It is Miss Atkins’s job, well after the play has established itself, to embody the vulnerable and destructible aspect of the same character. It must have been a strange task for the two actresses to share the part between them. It makes for an exceedingly affecting double performance, which is the focus of interest in the play.

I doubt that Mr Nichols intended any dramatic imbalance between husband and wife, if he seems inevitably to have taken the wife more seriously in her predicament. The husband is played by Benjamin Whitrow and Anton Rodgers, Mr Whitrow at first depicting the suave exterior, Mr Rogers being the ironic inner man. The audience responded at once to this as a comic device on the Morecambe and Wise model. The laughter came thick and fast, and the author revelled in his own professionalism and skill.  The women's double act, on the other hand, was introduced on quite different terms. Indeed, with the appearance of Miss Atkins on stage one was aware immediately that the play had been decisively altered. An extra passion, a new susceptibility had been introduced.

The deserted wife already mentioned (played by Priscilla Morgan) had lost her husband to a Dangerous Woman  (Louise Jamieson). Now it was Miss Morgan’s g1eeful business to reveal there had been a second Jamieson Raid and that Miss Whitelaw’s husband had been captured. It was at this moment that Miss Atkins entered. The first act of the play showed the wife apparently facing up to her husband’s infidelity with all the maturity with which we had credited her. In the second act (which some critics have taken to be superfluous – a fine judgement with which I disagree) we are shown the real humiliation of the wife.

It comes after the affair is presumed to be over – when, insofar as these things are ever possible, an accommodation has been made. Then the wife must discover that the affair is not over at all, and that her own trust of and friendship with the Dangerous Woman has been betrayed. The effect of this on the wife is truly shattering, since she finds that her moral reserves are just then at their lowest point.

From now on the playwright somewhat alters his own rules as established in the first act: the two pairs of actors cease playing the interior and exterior selves – they become almost independent, embodying alternatives, possibly contained within the same character. The comic element is transcended. The audience is deliberately disoriented, as the implications of the visible drama become less immediately clear. Patrick Robertson’s excellent set springs to life in the most surprising way. We are led into one nightmare from which we awake into a second nightmare. It is as if these succeeding nightmares were the chambers of a vast palace, and we were progressing towards some ultimate nightmare which was waiting to receive us in full pomp and splendour.

The title Passion Play with its religious overtones, points ironically to the absence of the religious element within the play itself. This is a piece about those who have no God but who are cursed with the need for a God. They look to art as a substitute for religion, and art, as it must inevitably do, lets them down. The husband is a picture restorer by profession - and there is a hint that this choice of the nearest profession to that of artist embodies the secret failure of his life. The wife sings in one of the great choirs, and expresses the view that “hundreds of people singing together is the nearest we may ever get to heaven on earth.” It is while she is pursuing this dream of heaven on earth that the husband first takes his opportunity for infidelity - an opportunity which sets up one of the best jokes of the play.

One of the best jokes but also one of the profoundest points. For Mr Nichols was right to pay attention to that peculiar aridity of religious music used in an entirely secular context. For an atheist age, something is inevitably frustrated in our appreciation of, say, the Dies Irae of the Verdi Requiem which rings out so surprisingly in the Aldwych Theatre, and which points us, so magnificently, in the direction of a belief which we have already intellectually ruled out.

Religious music, for the religious, has an infinitely humble function in the act of meditation of the Deity. The atheist rules out the Deity, then turns to religious music as if the Deity having been ruled out, the music will take over all His functions. It is a vain hope. Those who give up religion must give up the religious mode of thought. It is this which is so difficult and depressing to achieve. That is the underlying argument in Passion play which is directed by Mike Ockrent, and makes an exciting start to the theatrical year.