Rod Is God

It’s not a particularly great problem that Rod Is God is more a live TV sitcom than a play. There are far worse things wrong with it. The frequent pre-filmed video segments are the most soothing parts of this black comedy in which two relentlessly sparring flatmates successfully found a cult to make money. 

Slacker Jack and supermarket drone Rod don’t so much develop as characters as go through sudden schizophrenic changes. The initially amoral Jack switches from crass couch-potato to ardent cult-campaigner to aggressive do-gooder in the space of three scenes. Rod, the fake religion’s figurehead, alternates between horny, mopey and megalomaniacal in roughly the same amount of time. Only the the third cast member, odious PR man Cliff, remains consistently exhausting company. 

The cult of Rod they construct is dismally under-imagined. The opportunity to invent strange practices and requirements is lost, writer Lee Griffiths offering only a few printed t-shirts and a vague dictum of kindness. Even the curiously malfunctioning alarm clocks the cult offers its followers aren’t involved in any further twists. And the ‘end of the world’ Rod inevitably foretells is no further described. 

Rod Is God is well-produced, effectively acted and the characters’ conflicting views meet basic dramatic criteria, but there’s little here to laugh at or think about. Few gags go further than riffing off Eastenders and the larger theme of human gullibility proves uncompelling. With characters this unsympathetic it’s almost depressing to suspend disbelief enough to buy into the play itself.