The designer James Turner and I saw a chance to further scrutinise the characters and the arguments presented in the play by borrowing elements from the wave of true-crime Netflix documentaries like Making a Murderer or The Staircase, that have recently been streamed.

Of course, as with courtrooms everywhere, fictional or real, it is an incredibly nuanced and tense adventure as events and characters are hauled in front of the law, scrutinised and used to score points for the defence and prosecution attorneys. More a dissection of a story, than the unfolding of one. The framing device of a New York style courthouse, somewhere in downtown Purgatory, and the trial of the most infamous of Biblical characters, creates a script that functions much more as a theological argument than as a narrative driven drama. The Last Days of Judas Iscariot is unlike any play I’ve directed. Jesus: Don’t you think… that if I knew that it would have changed your mind…that I would have?

Judas: I made a mistake! And if that was wrong, then you should have told me! And if a broken heart wasn’t sufficient reason to hang, THEN YOU SHOULD HAVE TOLD ME THAT, TOO! Director Matthew Xia on the influences behind Stephen Adly Guirgis's The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, from the Gnostic Gospels to Making a Murderer.

Trial of judas iscariot