Jeffrey Archer, in the character of a doctor on trial for wife murder, was proclaimed guilty last night by a majority audience vote of 333 to 254. A more considered verdict might be that, as the play's author, he is also culpable of taking West End theatre back about 50 years by creating a cardboard courtroom drama.
Agatha Christie, you might say, lives on, except she did trial drama better in Witness for the Prosecution: there was even an American 1920s play, Trial of Mary Dugan, with alternative endings depending on how a selected audience jury voted. Undeterred, Archer resuscitates an old form in which we are presented with conflicting evidence about the accused cardiac surgeon. Did he poison his wife with potassium chloride in order to claim her life insurance? Or is he being framed by a vindictive nurse with whom he may or may not have had an affair? Only those who desperately care need hasten to the Haymarket.
It would take a Freudian analyst, however, to work out what Archer is really up to in this musty museum piece. On one level, the play is naked self-display: the accused is called Sherwood - and Sherwood Forest was famed for its archers - and is not only an heroic war veteran but is described as having "a brilliant and subtle mind". Yet the play also feels like a self-accusatory ritual: without giving the game away, one can reveal that if the fictional protagonist Archer plays had admitted to the lesser sin of adultery he might have escaped on the more serious charge. Make of that what you will.
What one can say is that, as drama, the piece takes an age to get going and is full of plonking exit lines and musty forensic trickery. An illiterate porter, who has provided damning evidence for the prosecution, cries out: "I only told them what you told me to say." And the credibility of the nurse hinges on the fact that she writes with her left hand while claiming to be dexterous. I had the sensation of watching a conjurer pulling some very dead rabbits out of some very old hats.
The suspense, such as it is, rests on how Lord Archer will perform when it is his turn to act. To be fair, he inflicts cruel and unusual punishment on himself by being forced to witness his own play in virtual silence for the first two acts. But, in the third act, he takes the stand and delivers his lines with the over-rehearsed sing-song of a man apparently reading from an invisible autocue. Real acting is about creating a sense of spontaneity: Archer gives the impression he is studying to be an amateur.
Michael Feast and Edward Petherbridge as the opposing counsels show how these things should be done by investing their ponderous lines with measured irony. But the clunkiness of Val May's production is symbolised by Old Bailey chimes that come in too early and by pieces falling off the set. By the end the audience collapsed into laughter not, I fear, in sympathy but in sheer disbelief at the solemn ineptitude of the spectacle they had witnessed.
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