Billed as ‘an original law drama’, Hanzla MacDonald’s new play Court certainly is that. It follows the trial of Suleyman Jones (Tim Schneider), a recent convert to Islam, who is being prosecuted for assisting with seven suicides while sojourning in an Indian mental asylum. He is flanked throughout by his dirt-obsessed lawyer, Adil Aziz (Ibrahim Khan), and the troubled lesbian Prosecution, Harriet Macaulay (Fi Johnston). Then there are the manifestations of both lawyers’ guilty consciences: a skittish convict named Mickey Turner, and Harriet’s father, Paul (both played by Gabriel Nicklin). You’d be forgiven for any confusion in attempting to reconcile these seemingly disparate elements.
Court takes us between past and present, real and imagined, and everything in between. Without effectively used alterations of lighting state, the audience would no doubt have been lost in this complex script. Unlike many writers in Oxford, MacDonald is not a novice: two of his plays have been professionally staged at Coventry’s Belgrade Theatre, and that experience is easily detected. The dialogue feels like it was written by someone comfortable with their own voice, and not – thankfully – like a poor-man’s Pinter. Sometimes, however, MacDonald himself is too pervasive, giving lines laced with that authorial smugness which comes through when A Clever Thing to Say is put in a mouth which doesn’t suit it.
In playing ‘a sort of narrator’, Schneider’s background in stand-up is evident. The assurance with which he chats to the audience ably glides over the initial unease emanating from the stalls, yet he employs a sarcastic knowingness which, though a mainstay of comedians, jars here. Perhaps it is intentional that he never quite connects with his fellow performers, but it renders the story somewhat disjunctive. The performance is overly cynical, ramming home an artifice which precludes any care about the outcome of Suleyman’s trial (in which his life is at stake). Khan struggles to give anything meaningful to a character who serves mostly to feed us clever turns of phrase and discourses on the similarities between dirt and law, though manages to sustain a sinister affability throughout. Similarly, Johnston (beyond some first-night jitters) never quite manages to show any emotional truth with which we could engage. By contrast, Nicklin’s vivid characterisations bring a welcome bolt of energy and excitement to proceedings. It is testament to his skill that, when he burst into the scene having switched role, it took me a while to realise that it was the same actor (despite the costume change being minimal). The prevailing dissonance between actor and character is nowhere to be seen here, allowing him to drag an otherwise rather languid play into a genuinely dramatic penultimate scene. Sadly, he highlights what could have been if director Eamon Jubbawy had pushed the rest of his cast to play the journeys of their characters faithfully and without reserve.
We are instructed to ‘call it meta-theatre; call it mental theatre’, and Court is undoubtedly at its best when it abandons the intellectual pretensions of the former and descends into the abject surrealism of the latter (the recounting of Suleyman’s journey to Islam, from ‘circumspection to circumcision’, is a highlight). Were these sections placed within a narrative which allowed the characters – not the playwright – to take centre-stage, Court could really engags with the themes which it touches upon but refuses to speak meaningfully about. As it is, we are left with a confusing ‘conceptual muddle’.
THREE STARS
