‘Is the accuser always holy now?” asks the hero of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. It is a line that echoes through modern drama and underpins Andrew Keatley’s topical play about a teacher facing allegations of historical abuse. One of three pieces being given a second life in Hampstead’s downstairs space, where it was first staged last year, it confirms the gift for exhuming family secrets that Keatley displayed in The Gathered Leaves in 2015, even if it could still make its points more succinctly.
Keatley’s hero, Daniel, is a dedicated teacher confronted by the charge that six years previously he sexually assaulted a female pupil during a school trip to Ypres. We see how Daniel’s life is gradually destroyed by the accusation. Suspended by the school, he faces repeated interrogation by his lawyer, finds his wife starting to doubt his innocence and sees his seven-year-old daughter traumatised by the investigation. Once the police make a formal arrest, Daniel is vilified in the popular press, undergoes trial by social media and finds himself publicly branded a paedophile.
Keatley’s larger theme is that no one is perfect and that we have all done things of which we are ashamed. But, in order to make the point that Daniel, however innocent, has his defects, Keatley overdoes the circumstantial detail. It’s quite enough that Daniel shields the exact truth from his lawyer, but, as his past is dredged up, we learn that he had a drinking problem, watched schoolgirl porn and was a sexually rampageous student. Any one of those would be sufficient to show that we all have secrets that might one day be used in evidence against us.
Performed in an intimate traverse space, the piece has a claustrophobic power well caught in Simon Evans’ fast-paced production. Alec Newman captures perfectly Daniel’s sense of rage and frustration at seeing his whole life subjected to merciless scrutiny. Susan Stanley admirably conveys his wife’s doubts and fears, and there is impeccable support from Leah Whitaker as his starchy lawyer and from Tillie Murray as his daughter. It is she who gives the play its title by mishearing the word “allegations”. But the whole play is based on the plausible premise that any one of us could be ruined by a simple misunderstanding.
• At Hampstead theatre, London, until 22 July. Box office: 020-7722 9301.
