Of all the strange meetings that could be dreamed into theatrical life, or afterlife, would many be more worth witnessing than Jesus’s first close encounter since the crucifixion with Judas Iscariot, who killed himself after his betrayal of the Messiah? Just such a scene, rivetingly imagined, brings this extraordinary religious fantasy, by that promising American playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis, to a close and a consummation. The black and sometimes divinely amusing comedy, a court-room drama, which seeks to exonerate Iscariot from being consigned to hell, is far from being a straight, serious piece of religious pleading.

It could hardly be that conventional when set in a place called Hope, near downtown Purgatory, which has its own “movie theatre and a little park that people can walk their dogs at”. In a sometimes too stridently pitched production by Rupert Goold, who staged that award-winning West End Macbeth last year, designer Anthony Ward appropriately makes Hope’s Court Room for Religious Hearings a desolate wasteland. Ward furnishes it with just two desks and the floor with slates and pebbles, while a sign in the gallery above misleadingly claims “In God We Trust”.

With a cast of predominantly American characters that includes Douglas Henshall’s cool, suave Satan, showing off black Gucci and a stylish white jacket, Sigmund Freud pronouncing on Judas’s unbalanced state of mind and being mocked for his cocaine habit and Ron Cephas Jones’s elegant but depraved Pontius Pilate, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot boasts some of the satirical spirit of Jerry Springer — the Soap Opera. Its characters even slip regularly into camp, rap, hip-hop and American street argot. “I was axed to look into the case of Judas Iscariot by this Irish gipsy lawyer bitch in Purgatory,” explains Saint Monica, who serves as a camply absurd counterpart to Mark Lockyer’s unctuous, girl-crazy, prosecuting counsel.

Despite his refusal to treat Christianity with conventional reverence and his use of TV dramatics for the Case of God, Heaven and Earth against Judas, Guirgis embarks on a deadly serious mission. He poses hard questions about how a merciful God can create hell and withhold forgiveness; how Judas, the closest of disciples, came to betray and whether he can be held responsible for Jesus’s crucifixion. Susan Lynch’s handsome, too histrionic lawyer summons Henshall’s artful Satan, whose nonchalant winsomeness sounds worse than his snarling invective. Gawn Grainger’s Jewish Elder, Caiaphas, crucially emerges as Jesus’s true betrayer, handing Jesus to Pilate, rather than Iscariot who recanted and tried to return the silver.

These revelations help charge the climactic meeting between Judas and Edward Hogg’s serene Jesus with transfixing pathos. Guirgis doesn’t make clear Judas’s motivating psychology. But there is no missing how Joseph Mawle’s astonishingly fine Judas electrifies the stage with his grief-stricken sense of fury and his strange conviction he was betrayed by the Jesus he worshipped, loved and lost. I cannot recall a young actor whipping up such an intense emotional storm. Guirgis gives theology a dramatic edge — even for agnostics.