Bath Theatre Royal
The single most electrifying moment I've experienced in a theatre this year didn't come during the performance of Reginald Rose's Twelve Angry Men at Bath Theatre Royal. It came in the after show discussion. Ten of the twelve actors came back on to the stage to answer the audience's questions. Would the play have been any different if it had been about twelve angry women? Is it significant that the only space which isn't the jury room is the bathroom? Had any members of the cast ever been called for jury service themselves?
And then someone asked the admittedly obvious question. The play is about an American jury hearing a murder case. The fact that the defendant will be executed if he is found guilty lends a high stakes urgency to the proceedings. Did any of the members of the cast agree with capital punishment in real life? The English actors all shook their heads, more or less firmly. And then Patrick Duffy (he of the shower, the ranch, and the webbed hands) who played Juror Seven (the Henry Fonda role) -- responded. "I don't mean to bring the mood down" he said "But both my parents were victims of a murder: gunned down in a bar they were running at the time. But I still do not support the death penalty."
Some people have said that the play itself is slightly creaky. It has an all-male cast. It's sometimes said to be all-white, although I seem to recall that in the movie the Fifth Juror is Hispanic. Here he is portrayed by a black actor, which makes the Tenth Juror's racist rant in Act II even more uncomfortable. A certain amount of disbelief has to be suspended around the behaviour of the jury. Presumably, if a real-life juryman discovered a material piece of evidence that blew open the entire prosecution case, he would present it to the judge who would order an immediate retrial. Even the long arguments about the noise made by passing trains and the state of the only eye-witness's eyesight are strictly speaking recapitulating the investigation, rather than simply deciding if the prosecution has proved its case. We know that American court appointed lawyers can be very bad indeed; but it stretches credulity to think that anyone could have missed some of the points that the jurors spot.
But it stands up astonishingly well as a piece of drama and as a theatrical conjuring trick. A cast of twelve, whose names we never learn; on stage simultaneously for two hours (we freeze frame and go to an interval after the "I'll kill you!!!" moment); arguing about the details of a trial we didn't see, for the life of a young man we'll never meet; all individualised and characterised to the exact extent they need to be; each with his own relationship to the other eleven. It isn't so much about what might really happen in a jury room, as about memory, perception, prejudice. An American Rashomon, if you will.
I've seen the film -- everyone has seen the film. I remembered the big set piece moments: the near fight at the end of the first half. The moment Juror Seven calls for a card vote, but says that he will abstain, causing Juror Nine, the old man, to switch his vote -- not because he thinks the accused is innocent, but out of respect for Seven's moral courage. Juror Ten's rant about immigrants and Juror Three's speeches about his own estranged son. But it is full of smaller, well observed character moments. When the black juror goes into the bathroom during the bigoted man's rant, another juror puts his hand gently on his shoulder. Juror Six, the house painter, is steadfastly convinced of the accused's guilt, but nevertheless sticks up for the old man, who decides early on that he is innocent. The little scene where the foreman suddenly and for no reason opens up to Seven about his time as a high school football coach.
The actual writing is not always stellar: you kind of wish that Mr Rose could have come up with some alternatives to "If that's not the most ridiculous story I ever heard!" and "I don't believe you people!" But many moments sparkle: when the advertising man says "Let's throw this idea on the stoop and see if the cat licks it up" and the foreman looks at him as if he's gone mad. When the bigot shamefacedly says that Seven had deliberately set out to make him angry and the fair-minded Juror Four replies coldly "He did an excellent job." When the bigot asks the eastern European watchmaker why he is always so polite, and the watchmaker replies "For the same reason you are not: it's the way I was brought up."
It can't be an easy play to stage: groups of characters breaking off to talk to each other; seated a lot of the time around a table, but always contriving to be facing or audible to the audience. The one production "idea", so clever that you don't quite realise it's happening, is that the table at the centre of the stage imperceptibly rotates as the play progresses.
In the Q&A Patrick Duffy noted that Juror Seven is not the angel in the white hat he is sometimes accused of being: he's actually quite short tempered and openly contemptuous of the jurors he regards as stupid. ("It's in the constitution: perhaps you've heard of it?") At times he seems to be more concerned that his "team" should win than in getting to the truth. The setting of the play is very firmly the 1950s; but it is full of ideas about fair trials and the burden of proof that resonate down to the present. At one point the bigoted juror appears to argue that he doesn't care about the facts because the accused is obviously guilty. The analogy with a certain president, a certain prime minister and certain web sites are hard to resist.
A pitch perfect production of a remarkable play; and the most intense theatrical evening I've experienced for a very long time.
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| And we met a very nice chap in the bar afterwards. |
I'm Andrew.
I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.
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