The American legal system is, it is fair to say, far from perfect. So there is certainly scope for ridicule.
But Mamet’s attempt at farce is so over the top it falls flat on its face. In short, a wasted opportunity, all the more disappointing given the premise of the play and his promise as a playwright.
The courtroom he conjures up is more fanciful than farcical. The judge is a pill-popping hypochondriac with a bad case of hay fever, who is so doped up on antihistamines he seems to have lost his marbles, or at any rate bearings. The prosecutor, who preaches traditional hard-line morality, is a closet homosexual whose gay lover has made a secret assignation with... (all right, just in case, I won’t give the game away). The defendant is a chiropractor who may or may not have been in Hawaii when he shouldn’t have been (though it never becomes clear why not) and who wants his attorney to frame a suitable alternative hypothesis to fit such facts as have, inconveniently, come to light. When his attorney refuses, he grows indignant: “Why did you go to law school? If you didn’t want to lie?”
The action takes place during some sort of criminal proceedings, the precise nature of which is never made clear. Nor do we ever learn of what crime the defendant stands accused. As there does not seem to be a jury present, one might infer that it was some sort of preliminary hearing. This lack of specificity may be deliberate, an attempt to recreate the sense of bewilderment and confusion which any casual observer is likely feel on wandering into a courtroom while proceedings are in progress, but it detracts from the play’s effectiveness as satire because it feels less rooted in, and therefore less targeted on a particular aspect of, the real world.
The farce seems to consist mostly of sudden revelations of hypocrisy or latent prejudice, as for example when defence counsel, during a private consultation with his Jewish client, suddenly comes out with a string of anti-Semitic insults. His immediate and abject apologies are accepted magnanimously, only to be countered afterwards with an equally vile stream of anti-Christian prejudice. It’s the sort of stuff that makes you gasp, or wince, rather than laugh. A bit like watching the guests on Jerry Springer dismantle their own dignity for the sake of a brief candle-flame of talk show celebrity, only without the presumption of verisimilitude enjoyed by reality TV.
Back in court, the judge reveals that he, too, is anti-Semitic, and homophobic as well. When the prosecutor’s gay lover turns up and turns out to be the same man (nicknamed “Bunny”) that the defendant was pretending not to have gone to Hawaii to meet (oops, now I’ve given the game away), and then the defendant confesses to bestiality (with a goose!) all sense of courtly decorum would seem to have been abandoned. But again, while a lot of people shouting at each other might be “uproarious”, it isn’t necessarily funny. In the end things get so silly that it begins to feel more like an opera by Donizetti (but without the jolly music) or one of those feeble sitcoms that descend into slapstick when ratings falter.
It is embarrassing too, because Mamet is no mere beginner. I came away with the impression that, far from exposing the latent prejudices, he was simply exploiting them, even revelling in them; and that his confrontational theatre was aimed not at catharsis but a sort of gleeful smug titillation. The comparison with reality TV seems ever more apt.
There are hints in the text (I bought the script) of something better. “This is the age-old problem facing Jurisprudence”, the judge says at one point. “Oh, I’d like to sit up there, and sentence people to death, and have a reserved parking space, and so on. It never occurs to you that there’s a burden which comes with it. Nooo. The Burden of Office. That burden is ... (pause) uh.... (pause). It’s uncertainty.” One can see where Mamet might be coming from. He’s not entirely unsympathetic to the judge’s position, but he can’t resist spicing up what is ultimately a fairly routine observation about the legal process with a cheap laugh about free parking and an opportunity for the actor (in that drawn-out “Nooo”) to ham things up a bit.
As it happens, the judge in the production I saw, at Islington’s Almeida Theatre, was played by John Mahoney, best known to viewers of the sitcom Frasier as the radio-shrink’s plain speaking dad, Martin Crane, and probably the main reason why most of the audience had come. He did his best with the part, and the rest of the cast was also good — notably Paul Ready as the gay lover Bernard, aka Bunny. In fact the production as a whole was excellent, as you’d expect from this trendy, cutting-edge theatre. It just seems a pity they hadn’t something a bit more cutting, a bit more edgy, to work with.
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