Kevin Spacey is clearing his desk, surrounded by a slew of papers and packing crates but also by a fly-on-the-wall audience who sit encircling him, just inches away. He spins around to scrutinise the front row from his vintage office chair, challengingly eye-to-eye yet with a glint of humour. Momentarily, you might wonder if the Hollywood star has turned into a teasingly autobiographical experimentalist. After all, Spacey is about to relinquish his own post as the Old Vic’s actor-manager, and this one-man show is his last on-stage appearance in tenure at the venue which — after a bumpy start in 2004 — he has triumphantly put back on the West End map.
Clarence Darrow is in fact a bio-drama and Spacey is reprising his barnstorming 2014 performance, playing the celebrated American lawyer who radically championed the underdog between the 1880s and 1930s. Yanking off his jacket in favour of a rumpled waistcoat, shirt and braces, Spacey’s gruff-voiced Darrow keeps saying he’s retiring. Yet, at odds with his stiff-backed stoop, he is beefy gusto incarnate, darting up the aisles as he recounts and relives the highs and lows of his legal career — including the contentious case of the teenage-thrill murderers Leopold and Loeb, wherein Darrow opposed the death penalty, and the Scopes monkey trial, when he trounced anti-Darwinian Christian educationalists.
Admittedly, the director Thea Sharrock’s revival looks slightly creaky when she has Spacey cross-examining invisible witnesses and illustrating historic cases by waving sepia photos of the accused (with what look like chunks of the script glued on the back). One might also cavil that David W Rintels’s play, from 1973, is economical with the truth about Darrow’s extramarital womanising but — along with very informative programme notes — Spacey slyly suggests that the man doesn’t have to be squeaky clean to be scintillating.
Moreover, this is a tour de force as he intriguingly switches between calculated showmanship and the manifestly heartfelt, between droll anecdotes and impassioned grandstanding. The latter, almost agitprop, is especially poignant when Spacey leaps to the defence of striking workers’ labour rights and decries racist miscarriages of justice. With tears in his eyes and sweat beading on his brow, he points a finger straight into the stalls, as if you’re on the jury right now and it’s over to you. Strongly recommended.
Box office: 0844 8717628, to Apr 11