A 15th-century priest, an 'antic comedy', and what medieval humour owes the present

At the centre of Timothy X Atack's new stage work Father Alberto and the Flying Girl, which reviews have begun to circulate as of late June 2026, is a man of the cloth with neither the temperament nor the theology for the work the late-medieval Church has handed him. In a fictional town in 1474 — somewhere south of the Alps, somewhere within reach of Rome — Father Alberto arrives at a parish charged with the care of people his neighbours would rather not see. The afflicted, the raving, the woman who believes she can fly: they are his flock now, and the village's patience for them has quietly expired.

The reason to sit with the piece, beyond its evident charm, is the bet it places on its audience. Atack asks whether a 21st-century reader can hold the antic and the awful in the same frame without flinching — whether the comedy of small-town cruelty toward the mentally ill, written with the lilt of farce, can register as indictment rather than endorsement. The early reviews suggest it can. Father Alberto and the Flying Girl plays, in The Guardian's phrasing, as an "absorbing tale" that manages to be "antic comedy" and "serious moral" in the same breath — a combination rarer in British stage writing than its practitioners tend to admit.

The premise and the pit

The setup is theologically specific, which is itself unusual. Alberto is not a saint in waiting. He is exhausted, slightly cynical, and institutionally embedded in a Church that views madness as moral category more often than medical one. The village regards the afflicted as a public nuisance, an affront to civic order, and — when convenient — a sign of God's displeasure with the community at large. Alberto's job is partly spiritual and partly custodial: keep these people out of sight, out of mind, and out of the parish ledger.

What unhooks the comedy is the arrival of a young woman who genuinely believes she can fly. She is not cured by prayer, not cured by fasting, not cured by the rigorous remedies the period had on offer. She is, however, listened to. The listening is the play.

Atack's direction — to judge by the production coverage — appears to lean into the chasm between village certainties and ecclesiastical doubt. The locals speak in the compressed shorthand of communal fear. Alberto speaks with the long sentences of a man who has read enough Aristotle to know that virtue is a mean, and that the mean between exorcism and neglect is harder to locate than the village would prefer.

A medieval frame, a contemporary load

The 1474 setting is not decorative. It permits Atack to work inside a moral economy in which the mentally ill had no civil standing, no diagnostic vocabulary, and no legal personhood distinct from the kin who would declare them possessed, fraudulent, or simply inconvenient. Drama set in this period can ask, by staging it, a question the present has only partly answered: when a community's response to suffering is to remove the sufferer, what is the function of the institutions that intervene?

That the play can ask the question without sounding like a thesis is the technical achievement the reviews single out. Father Alberto is funny — repeatedly, structurally funny — in a way that medieval-set British theatre usually is not. The genre's default mode in the UK has been the pageant: solemn, sonorous, weighted with period detail that often substitutes for feeling. Atack's writing comes from a different lineage. The seams of absurdist comedy show in the timing, in the way a character's dementia becomes a kind of accidental insight, in the way the village's piety curdles into paranoia under pressure.

There is a structural reason this kind of work matters now. British stage fiction has spent most of the post-2010 decade in the territory of the recent past — austerity dramas, housing dramas, NHS dramas, all of them necessary, most of them grim in the literal sense. The medieval turn that Atack's piece represents is, by contrast, a permission slip: to talk about the present by routing it through a setting where the materials — feasts, fasts, confession, excommunication — feel strange enough to require translation. The strangeness is the instrument.

The thesis, plainly stated

The reading experience amounts to this: that the historical Church, for all its later complicity in the stigmatisation of mental illness, was occasionally staffed by people whose pastoral training included a discipline modern bureaucracies have largely lost — the assumption that the sufferer deserves an audience before they deserve a diagnosis. Alberto is not heroic. He is barely competent. He is, however, present, in the way that small-town institutions of any era occasionally surprise themselves into being present. The villagers are not villains in the usual dramatic sense. They are frightened, and their fear has produced a small local consensus about what to do with the inconvenient, and the play is honest enough to show that consensus costing nothing and yielding nothing and persisting regardless.

If the work has a fault, the early reviews find it in pacing rather than proposition. The middle section lingers on liturgical argument that, however theologically textured, slows the human story to a near-stop. The affliction scenes — the exchanges between Alberto and the flying girl, in particular — carry the dramatic weight, and the play's confidence visibly grows when it returns to them.

What this leaves on the table

What remains undecided, after the first wave of notices, is whether the work travels. Father Alberto is a London stage production in 2026, written for a British audience familiar with the registers of state-funded theatre and the cadences of British devotional language. The medieval-Italian setting is its productive friction; it is also the thing most likely to limit appetite abroad, where the cadence of village-by-village antic comedy reads differently. The reviews have not yet had time to test whether a non-Anglophone audience hears the laughter the same way.

The other open question is whether the genre can sustain. Atack is working inside a small but growing tradition of British stage writing that treats the late-medieval parish not as backdrop but as laboratory. Whether Father Alberto is the marker of a turning point, or a striking outlier, is something only the next two or three years of programming decisions will resolve.

What can be said, on the evidence available, is that the play believes the 15th century and the 21st are not as separated as the costume suggests — that the institutions and cruelties one associates with the first are quiet, present-tense possibilities in the second, and that a comedy willing to say so is doing necessary work. Whether the audience agrees will become clearer once the production settles into its run.

Desk note: this publication has framed the piece as a sustained literary review rather than a notice, on the grounds that the medieval-set British stage work is a category whose conventions deserve closer attention than the standard review column allows. The Guardian review is the primary source for the production's tone and the dating of the run; the production's broader theatrical lineage is treated as an editorial judgment grounded in coverage of the genre.