Who judges the judges? Shakespeare asked the question in Measure for Measure. And the same query lies at the heart of John Mortimer's new play, a pleasantly old-fashioned mixture of moral debate and courtroom drama buoyed up by a star performance from Leslie Phillips.
Mortimer interweaves two apparently disparate stories. Byron, a black 17-year-old, is accused, on the basis of a suspiciously full confession, of murdering his mother's lover. Meanwhile three High Court judges - the staid Keith, the frisky Elspeth and the amiably liberal Fred - are confined together in a safe provincial house while they execute the local law. Byron's case is being tried before the stern, unbending, Angelo-like Keith. But when Elspeth invites an accountant back to dinner one night, it transpires that he has a blackmailing stranglehold over this most upright judge.
Mortimer understands well the nooks and crannies of the law and the gap between its presumed impartiality and the fallibility of its executants. He not only shows Byron's odious prosecutor making a clumsy pass at his female opponent over a chummy, eve-of-case dinner; he also, in the play's best scenes, shows the well-intentioned Fred putting the screws on the supposedly incorruptible Keith in the interests of natural justice. The law, Mortimer implies, will always be an imperfect instrument as long as it is in the hands of flawed, susceptible human beings.
This humane and sympathetic play is also, however, flawed. We never learn enough about the circumstantial details of Byron's alleged crime to make up our minds about his innocence or guilt; you feel Mortimer possibly knows less about black teenagers than he does about High Court judges. His admirable desire to entertain also overcomes his representation of the sometimes wearisome legal process. Revealingly, he remarks in the programme: "You can't afford to have a second of boredom in thetheatre or the whole thing collapses". But Hamlet, Faust, Peer Gynt, all great plays, have their moments of ennui: boredom is the price you pay for excavation of the truth.
No danger of boredom here, however. Certainly not while Leslie Phillips as the bumbling Fred is putting the case for judicial lenience. Phillips fluffs his lines and flirts with the audience but he has the instinctive timing of the born comic and can even get a huge laugh from the word "blimey", which, according to Ackroyd's London, is "fading out of discourse". Nicholas Jones as the hollow pillar of the law, Anna Carteret as the sex-hungry Elspeth and Geraldine Alexander as the harrassed defence counsel for Byron lend firm support in Christopher Morahan's well-drilled production .
And if the play appeals to our own sense of tolerance, it is because Mortimer himself is clearly on the side of the angels and against the judicial Angelos.
Until February 24. Box office: 0113-213 7700.
