Why would corporate monster Robert Maxwell get together with 20th-century living saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta?

In his imagination of the meeting, Ian Curteis, controversial author of the drama documentary The Falklands Play, comes up with some surprising ideas.

The meeting certainly happened.

It took place in London on Friday, April 15, 1988, and the only witness was a photographer who left as soon as the meeting began. Both subjects are now dead and there is no record of what was said.

For the purpose of his play, Curteis adds a fawning but cynical Maxwell minion and Sister, a seeming financial whizz kid and Mother Teresa's number two. It is all set in the luxury of Maxwell's Thamesside flat and consists mainly of conversations and some not so gentile blackmailing.

Maxwell (Michael Pennington) wants the nun (Anna Calder- Marshall) to sign a preface to a dodgy religious books he is publishing and offers in return the services of his then newspaper The Daily Mirror, to help her with her fundraising.

In return Mother Teresa has her price, which she refuses to disclose until the very end.

Curteis's play is certainly very funny and at times tense but does not, I think, have a great deal of lift to it, although Pennington plays Maxwell with all the horror of the public man, much beloved of satirists and anti-capitalists.

Calder-Marshall's Mother Teresa is a cool character and in her negotiations shows herself to be as tough if not tougher than Maxwell himself.

But the play is far from convincing and the conversations are decked out with financial matters, which make it difficult to understand.

What we are left with really is some high-level cartooning, rather than any convincing truth.