Wednesday 7th March 2007. Wellington. New Zealand.

After breakfast at Victoria Street Cafe I have spent the day in the internet cafe working on the project and answering e-mails.

I am now being driven nuts by the smells. A man earlier on this morning stunk of fish and the young guy who has been sitting next to me for the last ten minutes hasn't seen a shower for months I suspect.

In the late afternoon I dine at St John's Heineken Hotel. The building at 5-9 Cable Street was commissioned by Charles Norwood for the Wellington Free Ambulance Association and served as the first purpose built ambulance station in New Zealand. Designed in the Art Deco style of the immediate post-Napier earthquake period the building was vacated in 1994 and became a bar in 1998.

This is a fantastic building but the bar attracts a pretentious clientele which suits its restricted menu. Whilst the food was not great the staff were lovely...but I have to leave...the two young men beside me spend the whole time talking about how much money they and their families have...Someday they may learn that there is more to life than money!!

I decide (since I am still hungry) that I might try afternoon tea at the Museum Hotel...But oh, how sad, this is one of those places that simply tries too hard. It has that wonderful mix of arrogance and pretentiousness with a staff who spend all their time beautifying themselves. It is so sad when places try so hard to be something they never can be!

Tonight I am at Circa Theatre. Its the Donmar if you are a Londoner and the Citz's if you are a Glaswegian.

Circa Theatre staged its first production in April 1976 and has since gained a reputation as one of New Zealand's liveliest and most innovative theatres. Circa was a pioneer of the cooperative system where all available resources are directed towards those involved in mounting the production. This is a system which in stressing the qualities of commitment and self-help, promotes the pursuit of theatre of the highest professional standard.

Tonight I am attending Doubt, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer prize for drama. Written by John Patrick Shanley the play is set in a Catholic church and school in New York's Bronx in 1964. On the surface it is a struggle between the nuns who teach on one side and the male dominated hierarchy on the other. It is a play about the struggle between the old and the new church as a basis for a deeper debate about the struggle between the old and the new world orders.

In the world of 1964: Kennedy is dead, Vietnam has been bombed and civil unrest is rife. The social fabric of America is beginning to unravel. This play, seen through the eyes of four very different people, is a struggle searching for truth and certainty.

The play offers poignant social comment on the world today; a world where we live with the same public sense of hopelessness that was shared by all in the wake of the Kennedy assassination.

Whilst we all shared the public grief of 9/11 and we revel in the emotional outpourings that now follow as standard national events such as the death of Princess Diana; what of the pain of the individual...do we care? After all it is only the individual who knows their private trauma and who has no-one to share this with...and that's the way our touchy feely society likes it??

Innocence is only ever freedom in a world without evil and this play holds central the idea of racism/bigotry/ignorance and the dangers such lies can hold.

Racism/bigotry/ignorance are often the result of something that is missing in an individual's life. A feeling somehow that they don't belong which causes them to fear the unknown.

With Sister Aloysius we see the idiocy of an obsessive belief. Cast in the mould of George W. Bush we are forced to question our own perceptions...is the struggle simply ignorance or is it blinded by a belief in pursuit of the greater good (which may in the long-term be proved correct or may be questionable)?

We are forced to question the fact that for us all there are times in life when we feel lost and yet we are reminded that you are not alone...life happens to others too!

John Patrick Shanley asks us "Have you ever held a position in an argument past the point of comfort? Have you ever defended a way of life you were on the verge of exhausting?"...We might all want to think about these questions in our post 9/11 world!

Shanley was inspired to write this concise play after the decision to go to war in Iraq but chose to set the (almost detective drama) action some 40 years earlier allowing a distance in which he could raise questions about morality and uncertainty. At the heart of the play is ambiguity and the complexity of searching out the truth.

This was an outstanding production superbly acted a modern day Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee.

Oh...and just in case you think this is yet another feeble attempt at maligning the Catholic Church...Shanley notes that

"this play is dedicated to the many orders of Catholic nuns who have devoted their lives to serving others in hospitals, schools and retirement homes. Though they have been much maligned and ridiculed, who among us has been so generous?"