Pope-ally wired! Why Mark E Smith’s maligned Catholic play is getting a reboot

‘A real oddity’ … Leigh Bowery, right, in the original 1986 production at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, London View image in fullscreen ‘A real oddity’ … Leigh Bowery, right, in the original 1986 production at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, London Pope-ally wired! Why Mark E Smith’s maligned Catholic play is getting a reboot The Fall frontman’s play about a papal plot appalled critics when first staged in 1986, with Leigh Bowery starring as a cardinal. Luciani is back – but does it make any more sense 40 years on? When Steve Hanley joined Manchester post-punk group the Fall, he expected to be playing bass guitar, not the pope on the London stage. “I was the new pope,” remembers the musician. “I had a full pope suit on with about seven different layers of cassocks, and I’d come out to wave.” Hanley’s papal arrival signalled the final moments of a kaleidoscopic and surreal production that encompassed mafia gangsters, exiled Nazi commanders, and the performance artist Leigh Bowery playing a cardinal. “It was bizarre,” Hanley concedes. View image in fullscreen An original poster for Hey! Photograph: Riverside Studios ArchiveIn December 1986, Hey! Luciani: The Life and Codex of John Paul I ran for two weeks at Hammersmith’s Riverside Studios. To its author Mark E Smith, the Fall’s iconoclastic vocalist and lyricist who died in 2018, it was “a cross between Shakespeare and The Prisoner”. To critics, however, it was a disaster. “The thoroughness of Smith’s failure must be accounted his only achievement,” derided the Guardian. Even the traditionally Fall-supporting Melody Maker called for “an immediate and bloody end to Arts Council funding”. But 40 years later, Smith’s play is coming back from the dead. This week, at Manchester’s Band on the Wall venue, comedy screenwriter Graham Duff – a one-time collaborator with Smith – will restage Hey! The script was ostensibly about Pope John Paul I, (born Albino Luciani) whose sudden death in 1978 33 days after the conclave that elected him. It was reportedly written on beer mats and delivered to Riverside in a shoe box. “Mark was very cagey with the script,” explains Hanley of rehearsals. “He’d only give you your bit, so it was hard to figure it out.” The play seemed to take its thesis from In God’s Name, a 1984 bestseller a complex web of Vatican corruption. But it did not help that the cast were mostly non-professional actors, an echo of Smith’s DIY preference for untrained musicians. “Nightclubs used to pay Leigh Bowery just to turn up,” remembers Hanley of the outlandish Australian fashion icon. “So after the play he’d just move on to his real job.” When Duff was approached to restage the play, he began interviewing those who had worked on or witnessed the initial run. “Jackie O’Malley,” explains Duff of one of the 1986 cast, “was an 18-year-old drama student who got introduced to Mark in the Haçienda.