“I’m not a God-squad type. I’m a beyond-lapsed Catholic. Yet something in me shudders at the thought that the only reference to a divine creator anywhere apparent on our stages this fortnight so far as I can tell, aside from the noble Italian invasion, is in His Dark Materials at the Birmingham Rep, where God, sorry ‘The Authority’, isn’t so much dead, as in need of a mercy killing. … And yet our rich theatrical tradition sprang from the church.”