Writer: Luke Stiles
Director: Toby Clarke
A cross looms on the wall and signals, along with the title, that Miraculous is a play about religion. But Luke Stiles’ witty, engaging debut drama also deals with power, honesty, integrity, friendship and intergenerational dynamics.
Paul (Diego Zozaya) is a dedicated youth camp pastor, cheerfully shepherding young souls. One of his charges is Josh, a troubled and troubling student, whose frank questions illuminate exactly the pastor’s own areas of unease: sex, violence, revelation. Both actors are utterly convincing and watchable. Writer Luke Stiles plays Josh and gives a compelling performance with believably teenage physicality (sulky and hunched in a hoodie, nervously jiggling, sprawling, prowling, shrugging). The play draws on Stiles’ own life, growing up in southern California, going to church and Christian youth group every week, and to a residential program like this in the Oregon mountains every summer.
The evocative set, stage managed by Maia Thompson, is basic: a desk and chair, a camp bed, a guitar, and folding stools that serve a range of functions. On a cork board, there’s a timetable and posters. One shows books of the Bible; another says, in a cringe-intensifying font, “God is so cool”.
The script is fast-paced and personal. Stiles’ intimate knowledge of evangelical church culture has given him a pitch-perfect feel for: “its rhythms, its language,” as he explains in an interview with Broadway Baby. He knows just “how it can make you feel chosen and confined at the same time” and explores what happens “when sacred language collides with adolescent chaos, when you know the doctrine but start having real adult questions.”
Masculinity in crisis, generations in conflict, and the search for meaning in a world that feels frighteningly confusing. Stiles touches on all these themes and shows how religion’s comforting structures and strictures are both alluring and potentially dangerous.
“Did you have sex before marriage?” asks Josh immediately – to the alarm and embarrassment of the pastor, who tries to divert their conversation instead into a series of bland pro-forma questions about walking with Jesus. Much of the play’s humour comes from this clash. The dialogue is often laugh-out-loud funny with verbal gems like Josh’s 20-second precis of the Bible, which starts “God creates Earth, human invents murder…” and reduces the New Testament to “Four guys write the same story – boom – Apocalypse”.
Why don’t miracles still happen? Josh queries, and continues: “Imagine like having the power to create the entire world with a handful of sentences, or remotely impregnate a fourteen-year-old virgin, or parting a sea, or any of those like massive, real things, and then like, retiring.” When Josh calls out the lack of consistency in the Bible’s mosaic image of God, the pastor hazards: “Well, having a son changes you…”
Zozaya and Stiles work brilliantly together on stage. Both trained in classical acting at LAMDA, they have collaborated on other projects, performing Zozaya’s A Mechanical’s Midsummer Night’s Dream at a theatre festival in Beijing. Stiles wrote the role of Paul with his fellow-actor in mind.
Toby Clarke’s flawless direction helps give the show both pace and pathos. A horribly realistic fight is directed by Jon Aaron. After all the sparky comedy of the first half, the shift of mood as the play hurtles towards its stormy climax is skilfully handled. Amy Fisher’s lighting design helps choreograph the changes: sunshine pours through the door of the pastor’s cabin and, later, there are dark silhouettes in a rainy night-time scene of desperation. The composition and sound design by Pierre Flasse and singing by Antony Lam add deeper layers to this quickfire two-hander.
The energetic wit and drama of Miraculous bowl along so swiftly that they skate over any weaknesses in the play’s philosophical foundations. This is a morally complex work which deliberately raises all kinds of questions without answering them. The evangelical setting will probably resonate directly with fewer audience members in London than it might in the States, but the interrogations of hypocrisy, sincerity, power and control are relevant and riveting.
Runs until 21 March 2026
