Legal Fictions - The Dock Brief/Edwin

Synopsis

In The Dock Brief, an incompetent barrister represents the lugubrious Mr Fowle, who confesses to murdering his jovial wife. Despite a well-rehearsed defence, in the courtroom everything goes horribly wrong. In Edwin, retired High Court Judge Fennimore Truscott still sits in judgment on people - in his imagination. But turning his suspicious mind on his wife's friendship with the next-door neighbour opens up a can of worms.

Our Review:

29 February 2008

John Mortimer, frail and virtually wheelchair-bound as he nears his 85th birthday, presents such a genial face to the world, both as man and writer, that it would be dangerously easy to regard this Legal Fictions bill of two short plays, The Dock Brief (1957) and Edwin (1982), as some sort of last hurrah for conventional West End standards.

It’s true that neither piece, in which Edward Fox plays first a failed barrister and then a retired High Court judge, comes at you with the buttonholing intensity of Sarah Kane or Mark Ravenhill. But in their own way, they stand for decency, fair play and a largeness of spirit that characterise their author in his lifelong defence of free speech.

Designer Mark Bailey provides Christopher Morahan’s elegant production with a theatricality essential to plays which started out as radio drama; in the first, the fidgety little wife murderer and birdseed shop owner, Fowle (Nicholas Woodeson)...

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Latest User Review

QuincyMD - 8 March 2008:

Go for the first half and then leave at the interval. The first half is a nice gentle comedy about a murder trial going wrong with a neat twist ending whilst the second half is a meandering waste of time with a twist that I'd managed to work out within 10 minutes....

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