When Steve Hanley joined Manchester post-punk group the Fall, he expected to be playing bass guitar, not the pope on the London stage.

“I was the new pope,” remembers the musician. “I had a full pope suit on with about seven different layers of cassocks, and I’d come out to wave.” Hanley’s papal arrival signalled the final moments of a kaleidoscopic and surreal production that encompassed mafia gangsters, exiled Nazi commanders, and the performance artist Leigh Bowery playing a cardinal. “It was bizarre,” Hanley concedes.

In December 1986, Hey! Luciani: The Life and Codex of John Paul I ran for two weeks at Hammersmith’s Riverside Studios. To its author Mark E Smith, the Fall’s iconoclastic vocalist and lyricist who died in 2018, it was “a cross between Shakespeare and The Prisoner”. To critics, however, it was a disaster. “The thoroughness of Smith’s failure must be accounted his only achievement,” derided the Guardian. Even the traditionally Fall-supporting Melody Maker called for “an immediate and bloody end to Arts Council funding”.

But 40 years later, Smith’s play is coming back from the dead. This week, at Manchester’s Band on the Wall venue, comedy screenwriter Graham Duff – a one-time collaborator with Smith – will restage Hey! Luciani. The rehearsed reading, with full costume and music from local Fall tribute band The Look Back Bores, is part of a 50th anniversary Fall celebration festival. “This is a poisoned chalice,” enthuses Duff of taking on the maligned play. “It’s a real oddity.”

In 1986, the Fall were at the peak of their commercial powers: that year’s album had soared to an unprecedented 36 in the UK album charts. “Mark always wanted more out of a band than touring and recording,” explains Hanley, who was the second longest serving member of the group after Smith. “I remember him telling me years before that he was thinking of writing a play.” When Riverside called Smith’s bluff, the singer spent a US tour obsessively writing in hotel rooms and bars. The script was ostensibly about Pope John Paul I, (born Albino Luciani) whose sudden death in 1978 by heart attack came just 33 days after the conclave that elected him. It was reportedly written on beer mats and delivered to Riverside in a shoe box.

“Mark was very cagey with the script,” explains Hanley of rehearsals. “He’d only give you your bit, so it was hard to figure it out.” The play seemed to take its thesis from In God’s Name, a 1984 bestseller by David Yallop alleging that Luciani had in fact been assassinated as part of a complex web of Vatican corruption. But it did not help that the cast were mostly non-professional actors, an echo of Smith’s DIY preference for untrained musicians. “Nightclubs used to pay Leigh Bowery just to turn up,” remembers Hanley of the outlandish Australian fashion icon. “So after the play he’d just move on to his real job.”

When Duff was approached to restage the play, he began interviewing those who had worked on or witnessed the initial run. “Jackie O’Malley,” explains Duff of one of the 1986 cast, “was an 18-year-old drama student who got introduced to Mark in the Haçienda. He just said, ‘Do you want to be in this play that I’m doing?’”

The lightbulb moment for Duff came when a top secret bootleg VHS recording of the play – long rumoured, thought missing – materialised. “I thought: this is not a mess,” says Duff firmly of the recording. “Everybody is hitting their cues, the band are tight, the lighting is good. It might be obscure, or difficult to decode, but it works perfectly.”

The problem, Duff reckons, is that critics were expecting a rock musical. “But Mark is a classic postmodern storyteller,” explains the director. “You get ridiculously convoluted narratives, the erasure of differences between high and low art, references to other fictional worlds.”

Its cryptic nature might even be the point. “Part of what he’s doing is showing you that the Vatican is so bound up in bureaucracy, banking, business,” says Duff, “that the act of worship is actually quite low down. Big events happen, people get murdered, power changes hands. But the world goes on and the little people don’t have any say in it.” To make these themes more explicit than in 1986, Duff has hired professional actors: the former Britain’s Got Talent contestant turned Coronation Street star Jack Carroll plays Mark E Smith who was narrator in the original production, while standup Jonathan Mayor becomes Leigh Bowery’s cardinal.

Should June’s performance be a success, Duff hopes that his version might get picked up by one of Manchester’s bigger arts institutions. “I’ve seen stuff that’s got lots of funding and decent audiences,” pitches the director, “that is not anywhere near as ambitious or interesting as Hey! Luciani.”

While he won’t be on stage this time, Hanley’s hopes for the evening are more modest. “I’ve been arrested twice in my life,” says the bassist cheerfully. “Once, on my way home after the play, and once at Band on the Wall. If I can get through the night without getting arrested then I’ll be happy.”