Papal power meets Poirot

...and other London cultural highlights this week

Blessed are the meek, for they shall likely win an Academy Award.

What I’ve seen

Conclave, out tomorrow, has been the subject of a certain amount of chat about whether or not Ralph Fiennes might be up for an Oscar for his turn as the limpid cardinal Lawrence, brow permanently furrowed as he glides through the halls of the Vatican, trying to herd cats, sorry, cardinals, into a conclave to choose a new pope.

A conclave is when all the cardinals from all over the world travel to the Vatican to be locked in - the voting happens in the Sistine Chapel - and don’t leave until they’ve made a final decision, based on a totally opaque set of criteria that is never even vaguely expressed.

The idea of the lock-in is not to be influenced by outside interests, though as Lawrence quickly discovers when he’s put in charge of the affair, there are quite enough conflicting inside interests to keep him very, very busy.

Structured slightly like a Poirot mystery but without the tiresome group reveal at the end, the film is based on Robert Harris’s page-turner of a novel, a thriller that explores the same subject as all Robert Harris novels, which is the acquisition, maintenance, exercise and effect of power.

Hear me and the Nicks review All’s Well That Ends Well at the Sam Wanamaker, and A Christmas Carol at the Old Vic - plus a lovely interview with National Treasure™ Simon Russell Beale - in the new episode of our podcast The London Theatre Review, this Sunday. Find it and the full archive here or wherever you get your podcasts

Four main candidates soon rise to the surface in the repeated papal votes - Stanley Tucci’s American liberal candidate, Bellini; the more powerful American Tremblay (John Lithgow), entrenched among the previous pope’s inner circle; Lucian Msamati’s quick-tempered Nigerian Adeyemi, gunning to become the first African pope but of concern to the liberals due to his hardline views on homosexuality; and Sergio Castellitto’s Italian ‘traditionalist’ (for which read card-carrying bigot), Tedesco.

And then suddenly, after a quietly devastating showdown with the blustering Tedesco in the Vatican’s plush boutique cinema (yep), there’s a new contender, Benitez - a priest who has been quietly working in Afghanistan, of whom no one had heard until the day before the conclave, but whom it transpires was made a cardinal in secret by the previous pope. Ooooh.

It’s great fun. The setting is beautiful, of course, with the Sistine Chapel faithfully replicated (I suspect at the famous Cinecittà studios), and the whole look of the film is sumptuous - apparently costume designer Lisy Christl eschewed the modern cardinals’ red for one that they would have worn in the 17th century, because it’s easier on the eye.

Fiennes as Lawrence, absorbing more and more troubling news about the various candidates despite his reluctance to interfere, is a great anchor, but everyone is good in it - Isabella Rossellini is brilliant, if criminally underused, as a senior nun, but then since the hard-working sisters who keep the place running are essentially invisible to these pious men of the cloth, it makes sense.