On August 26th 1978, an 80-year-old man called Giovanni Montini died in Rome.
He was better known to the world as Pope Paul VI.
In the fifteen years of his rule, the Vatican had become increasingly irrelevant to a world split into conflicting camps, of often brutal dictatorships propped up by the USA, and equally brutal dictatorships and impoverished nations happy to take the sponsorship of the USSR. His last year in power was almost moribund.
When he died, the cardinals who elect the pontiff unexpectedly chose the Bishop of Venice, a man portrayed in David Crane’s The Last Confession as a gentle, otherworldly soul as his successor.
The Last Confession starts with a meeting between an unknown Vatican emissary and the dying Cardinal Bellini, who but four short years before had had the possibility of wearing the papal ring himself; why the mantle passed instead to a little known Pole is the story at the heart of The Last Confession.
That the cardinals chose the pious, humble representative from Venice was because, according to this harsh examination of life in the halls of power of the Vatican, they believed that they could continue to manipulate him, as they had his semi-senescent predecessor.
Instead, Pope John Paul I proved to be very much his own man, and a man very much in the mould of the radical preacher of Galilee, rather than the power brokers of the late twentieth century.
First he abolished the triple coronation that every pope before has had in favour of a simpler service; then he insisted on walking amongst the commoners of Rome; and before long he started to take an interest in running his diocese, a turn of events that the Cardinals with their vested interests, found distinctly threatening.
Then, after thirty-three days, Pope John Paul I died unexpectedly, amid speculation among the Italian media that his death was unnatural.
It is unlikely that Crane will receive any Christmas cards from the Catholic authorities as he lays out the four suspects, but this play is as much about the corrupting nature of power, of the worldly temptations facing men who are supposed to serve God rather than man, than about who killed the Pope.
Even more than this, it is about the contradictions in the character of Cardinal Benelli, who had he gained five more votes, would have become pontiff in succession to John Paul I, and who freely acknowledges his own fierce ambition, even as he wrestles with what is right for the Catholic Church, superbly played in the Bath Theatre Royal by David (TV's Poirot) Suchet, more brutal inquisitor than Belgian detective.
A thought-provoking meditation on power, corruption and how far the church is from what it claims to be.
