ELEVEN comedians, plus the veteran actor Russell Hunter, in a revival of Twelve Angry Men? Sounds as likely as ten tragedians, plus the Duke of Edinburgh, in No Sex Please, We’re British. But at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, funny folk have been doffing their caps and bells and playing straight or straightish roles. And they’ve done no worse than, say, those Hollywood celebs who have taken sabbaticals on the London stage.
In the case of Guy Masterson’s production of Reginald Rose’s jury-room chiller, they have done better. Steve Furst, Bill Bailey, Stephen Frost and Owen O’Neill are all doing stand-up acts in Edinburgh this year, but that hasn’t stopped them giving excellent performances as (respectively) the well-meaning foreman, the tyrant who wants the electric chair for a 16-year-old who reminds him of his own disobedient son, the Wall Street broker whose cold head tells him to vote for conviction, and the earnest democrat who sets the play in motion by arguing that the prosecution’s watertight case may have leaks.
Henry Fonda famously played that role in Sidney Lumet’s screen version, and O’Neill has some of the same unsentimental decency and unpretentious incisiveness.
It’s not hard, I suppose, to quarrel with a play that’s over-carefully plotted, peopled with near-caricatures, and a mite didactic about justice. But you could level the same accusations against our own J.B. Priestley, another dramatist prone to giving civics lessons onstage. And who can say that the play has dated when America is still executing young people who, as here, have been ineptly defended? Actually, recent stories from the US leave me feeling that the evident incompetence of defence counsel isn’t a weakness in the play but a highly topical strength. The piece isn’t only gripping: it’s surprisingly plausible. And that’s thanks to comedians such as David Calvitto, Andy Smart and Phil Nichol, the scarily unfunny voice of punitive racism and blue-collar fascism.
Who is the madder in Jo Brand and Helen Griffin’s Mental, the nurses whom the two comedians play or their offstage patients? With Griffin’s Pat a Valium-addicted paranoid anal obsessive and Brand’s Jean a whey-faced depressive, it’s such a close-run thing that for the first ten minutes I thought that they were the patients. And that’s as it should have been, because the play is partly a Laingian comedy and partly a satirical attack on the NHS’s lower depths. There are amusing moments, as when Pat, who is Welsh as well as dim, is convinced by Brand, who combines dry wit with her dying-manitee looks, that George Bush has added Wales to his Axis of Evil. But couldn’t the overall effect be both funnier and tougher? I think so.
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