POLITICS IN THE VESTRY

By BRAD LEITHAUSER

IN THE THEATER THESE DAYS, HIGHmindedness is not a very seaworthy trait. Most of the English plays that have sailed across the Atlantic and landed on Broadway of late have been high-tech musicals or dramas ballasted by big-name movie stars. David Hare's Racing Demon--which has no major stars, focuses on two priests in the Church of England and traffics in both theological debate and sociological observation--is therefore an unlikely arrival.

And a welcome one. The drama opens with the Rev. Lionel Espy (Josef Sommer) alone on the stage--or perhaps he is not alone, for we catch him in a moment of intense prayer. (The play captures many of its characters in prayer, a device that neatly resuscitates the traditional dramatic soliloquy.) Espy is an aging, equivocating figure caught in an equivocal time and place: contemporary South London, a run-down environment in which brutality and indifference raise doubts about the church's relevance. He's the sort of man whose ability to see both sides of a question is cited as a lack of vision by those who perceive life with a terrible clarity--the world view, for instance, of the much younger Rev. Tony Ferris (Michael Cumpsty), who connives to unseat his older colleague. The play chronicles a sort of bloodless coup, with plenty of palace intrigue provided by the Anglican hierarchy.

Director Richard Eyre, who heads London's Royal National Theatre, draws able performances from nearly everyone as the play moves from synod to seedy bar, from cathedral crypt to council flat. Sommer offers an adept portrayal of a man rich in feeling but poor in political skills, and Cumpsty does a marvelous job of radiating dangerous certitude. He embodies the paradox of the sort of spiritual fervor that, while ostensibly surrendering itself to a Larger Power, borders on megalomania: every cloud in the sky, every leaf on the tree, serves as a personal signal corroborating his uncompromising judgments.

Racing Demon, which premiered in London in 1990, is part of a Hare trilogy that includes Murmuring Judges, which scrutinizes England's legal system, and The Absence of War, examining its politics. If the entire venture has something of an old-fashioned feel--a kinship with those "condition of England" novels of Wells, Galsworthy, Forster--that's probably all right with Hare, 48. With these plays (and others, such as Plenty and Map of the World), he has embraced a theater of social and moral probing. By frequently setting one character to debating another (about the ordination of women, declining church attendance, the desirability of chastity), Racing Demon exemplifies another old-fashioned genre: the play of ideas.

The congenital danger of such plays, of course, is a tendency to be peopled by talking heads rather than full-bodied characters, and Racing Demon sometimes does feel overly abstracted. But Brian Murray does a fine job of linking head to body: he plays, movingly, a homosexual priest who flees the country rather than face public exposure. In the moments when Murray trembles over a hastily packed suitcase, Hare shows he can do more than write an intelligent and noble play; he can shake the soul.