The spirit of the Lord Chamberlain is alive and well and prowling the estates of dead playwrights. We should have been seeing Night Must Fall right now, but those entrusted with the legacy of playwright Emlyn Williams refused to sanction director Ken Alexander's proposed update. It's hardly as if Perth is known for avant-garde revisionism, but censorship is rarely logical.
So step forward Vivien Adam, and a play, reputedly written in four days, custom-built for Night Must Fall's six-strong cast, including Rula Lenska and Nicholas Bailey. And what a curious beast it is. It's like Terrence Rattigan writing Desperate Housewives, a fascinating clash between the formally conservative and the politically subversive. It's a buttoned-up, old-fashioned play that examines the incendiary consequences of social repression.
From its title down, A Sense of Justice resembles the many creaky 1950s thrillers that have played on this stage. Set in an English middle-class house - complete with conservatory, armchairs and whisky decanter - it centres on the recently bereaved Stella, an elegant, dominating Lenska, who is followed home by a stranger - a playfully enigmatic Bailey - after a soul-bearing drinking session in the local pub.
It so happens that Ben, the stranger, is black, and his presence animates all the spiteful prejudices of these supposedly genteel people. Eventually we learn that Stella's husband, a respected pillar of the community, was a brutally racist police officer.
Like Ben, who is training to be a lawyer on the basis that "if you want to change things you have to do it from within", Adam has sent a Trojan horse into the reactionary form of drawing-room drama. Except the play has all the weaknesses of the genre it its trying to subvert. To be truly radical, it would need to question not only the values of the priggish characters but the stuffy nature of the well-made play itself. As it is, it is an anachronistic, if entertaining, halfway house.
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