Miraculous | King's Head Theatre

Luke Stiles’ Miraculous is a taut, witty and increasingly unsettling two-hander that begins as a sparring match about faith and ends somewhere far more emotionally volatile. Set at a Christian youth camp in the Oregon mountains, the play centres on Josh (Stiles), a wary teenager with little appetite for easy belief, and Paul (Diego Zozaya), a youth pastor whose calm, questioning manner is both disarming and faintly controlling.

What first looks like an earnest conversation about doubt, grace and miracles gradually becomes a sharper examination of power, guilt and the stories people tell in order to survive themselves.

The play’s great strength is that it keeps moving, with Toby Clarke’s direction as well as Stiles’ script facilitating this. Even when the philosophical arguments do not always feel watertight, the piece has enough verbal energy, humour and dramatic tension to carry the audience past any thinness in its intellectual foundations. Stiles writes arguments that sound like conversations rather than essays and brings them to life brilliantly alongside Zozaya. Josh’s irreverence and suspicion are recognisably teenage, while Paul’s carefully moderated openness has just enough warmth to make him persuasive and just enough evasiveness to make him dangerous.

At its best, Miraculous understands that belief is rarely only about doctrine. It is also about belonging, authority, shame, performance and the fear of being left outside the circle. The Christian camp setting is therefore more than a backdrop; it provides a charged social structure in which “questions” can become a form of pressure, and “forgiveness” can sound less like mercy than an instruction to move on. The play is particularly effective in the way it lets discomfort gather slowly: an apparently benign pastoral encounter begins to reveal imbalances of age, confidence and institutional power.

The central relationship is neatly calibrated, with contradictions in both men’s characters that bring them to life. Josh’s resistance has pain beneath it, while Paul’s compassion may be genuine, but it is inseparable from his need to shape the room, the conversation and perhaps Josh himself. That ambiguity gives the evening its pull. We are never simply watching faith being debunked or defended; we are watching two people use language to test, hide and wound.

The production also benefits from the compactness of its form. Set in a single room, with the hallmarks of a Christian camp brought to life by Meg Cunningham with lighting from Amy Fisher, the play feels intimate but not small. However, there are moments when the play’s larger theological provocations could be pushed further, and some of its arguments about miracles and belief may leave sceptical audience members wanting a deeper excavation.

What lingers is not a clean answer to the question of whether miracles exist, but a more troubling thought: that people can make miracles out of almost anything if the alternative is facing the truth.

Miraculous is sharp, compact and compelling, a play that uses theological debate as the doorway into something more human and more bruising.

Miraculous runs at the King’s Head Theatre until 20th June. For more information and tickets, follow the link here.

★★★★☆ (4*)

Gifted tickets in return for an honest review | Photography by Madeleine Bloxam Photography