Soho’s newest theatre plays host to an accomplished examination of faith that melds Frank Capra, Graham Greene and Samuel Beckett

A man is waiting at a New York subway station when he blocks the trajectory of a commuter attempting to throw himself under a non-stopping train. This collision of strangers has happened an hour or so before we meet the men, talking in the Samaritan’s apartment, at the start of The Sunset Limited, a play by Cormac McCarthy, a heavyweight American author most known as a novelist (All the Pretty Horses, The Road, No Country for Old Men).

The drama is receiving its UK première at the Boulevard Theatre, a playhouse that has just opened in London’s Soho, as part of the growth of an off-West End fringe theatre district (also including the Bridge and the Park theatres) in the manner of Manhattan’s off-Broadway.

The Boulevard is a renovation, as a three-level glass-fronted oblong, of Raymond Revuebar, which, from 1958 to 2004, was a striptease and erotic show joint. Relatively few venues can have been converted from pornography to theology, but that is what this production achieves for the site, as The Sunset Limited is a 90-minute debate about the possibility of God and an afterlife.