Jamie Armitage’s debut play, inspired by real events, runs until 22 February
The gripping power of watching a police interview unfold has been shown time and time again on screen and stage. Jed Mercurio’s Line of Duty pivoted on scenes set in an interview room, where accumulated evidence is put in front of someone pleading their innocence, until a crack appears.
An Interrogation, written and directed by Jamie Armitage, until now best known as the co-director of Six, ploughs the same ground with great sophistication. First seen and admired at the Edinburgh Festival in 2023, it places two people – police officer Ruth Palmer and her suspect Cameron Andrews – in a bare room, and lets the drama and tensions emerge from the twists and turns of their conversation.
The setup of this game of cat and mouse is relatively straightforward. A woman has died and another has now gone missing; the time scale for her survival is running down. Palmer needs a result, and her prime suspect is a man who seems, on the surface, a model citizen, a mild-mannered, charming businessman, with friends in high places.
The originality comes not just from the background that Armitage weaves into his script, the way that Palmer herself is part of a strategy devised by the male officers around her, one of whom occasionally appears, but also from the fact that the audience sees the action from two different viewpoints thanks to the large screen overhead, transmitting the interview.
Here, in Sarah Mercadé’s sombre, realistic design, the focus constantly changes. Sometimes we see the action from a neutral point on high, looking down on the players in the ebb and flow of their talk. Sometimes, the camera focuses on the face, on the twitch of an eye. Most tellingly, sometimes we see their hands beneath the table – Palmer’s fingers twitching as she tries to trap Andrews in a lie, his hand clenching despite his smooth demeanour.
It’s riveting to watch and a challenge for the actors – who rise to it brilliantly. As Palmer, Rosie Sheehy cleverly conveys both her own unease at some of the tactics she is using, and her unwavering belief that the man opposite her is guilty. Occasionally, electrifyingly, sometimes her conviction breaks out.
Armitage’s direction keeps everything taut, but the play has been slightly extended since its initial run and there is a sense of deflation and slowing down towards the close, when tension should really escalate. The interventions of Palmer’s boss, the manipulative, brash Culin (Colm Gormley) are more obvious and more explicit than the rest of the writing. Some of Palmer’s psychological goading seems a little too glib.
Nevertheless, this is a gripping piece of writing, that announces Armitage as a writer to watch and wait for.