This Story of Yours

By a curious coincidence, the same London week has brought back two long forgotten Royal Court plays both originally seen there in 1968: John Osborne's A Hotel in Amsterdam and now This Story of Yours by John Hopkins. They couldn't be more dissimilar in subject or tone, yet they share the fact that they are both compelling studies of abrasive characters who are captured with some strong dialogue.

This Story of Yours is partly a gritty docu-drama and also a gripping psychological drama that follows the unravelling of 41-year-old Detective Sergeant Johnson's 20 year police career when he brutally kills a suspect. Tensely laid out in three acts, it is structured as a series of confrontations that he engages in: a domestic scene at home with his wife, as he returns there drunkenly on the night of the killing and tries to talk to her about it; a second scene with the chief inspector launching an internal enquiry into the event; and finally, a flashback to the interrogation itself that results in the death of the suspect.

Holding all these variously harrowing, bruising encounters together is a riveting central performance from Anthony Cord - himself a long serving policeman as well as an actor - as Johnson: a role you could say he was born to play, if it weren't such a critical portrait of a policeman not merely at the end of his tether, but far beyond it. Full of pent-up rage but also completely certain that he is always right, this is one copper you wouldn't want to meet on a dark night.

But was he, in fact, right? That's the psychological aspect of Hopkins' drama, and this copper isn't much more of a sympathetic character either at home with his wife (Sue Scott Davison) or in front of someone of authority over him, Detective Chief Inspector Cartwright (Christopher Gilling).

As the play moves inexorably towards the replay of the fatal incident, with Paul Hamilton by turns convincingly belligerent and cowering as the suspect, it makes for powerful, pertinent stuff. It is absorbingly well realised in Guy Retallack's production, despite the tension being dissipated a little by the two intervals necessitated by unduly elaborate scene changes.

- Mark Shenton