The Viewing Room

It’s a bad sign when the menacing line, “Welcome to Death Row!”, closes Act 1 to barely muffled sniggers from the audience. A dramatic premise and daring vision of the future ultimately disappoint in this overwrought production. However, featuring the brooding presence of Heroes star Leonard Roberts, it is bound to sell out.

Writer Daniel Joshua Rubin’s idea is a simple and startling one. In a not a too distant future America, where people conduct global careers from their living room laptops and only venture into the polluted city in smog masks, Brian and his wife are a liberal WASPish couple, with a caged convict in their living room.

High-fliers with a social conscience (although Brian’s company makes a mint from the Domestic Incarceration Services security system) they are committed to rehabilitating their charge. Inevitably the situation changes their lives more violently than either foresee. Their prisoner is a murderer; their function is to administer a lethal injection and put the body, correctly documented, out with the recycling. What do their consciences dictate?

Sadly, from here, the melodramatic plot unravels like an episode of Oz penned by Alan Ayckbourn. Despite Rubin’s evident ideals of freedom, equality, civil rights and civil responsibility, there is a misogyny and racism underpinning the script. The unnamed Wife falls for the prisoner with an animalistic sexual passion that reduces him – a fit, black man behind bars – to sexy, caged wild animal.

The Wife is equally caged by her boring marriage: a simplistic demeaning comparison. By the time she yells at her weedy husband, “I would rather stick that lethal injection into my vein than have your children … When did you last pick up your own dry-cleaning?”, suppressed giggles become open laughter.

Part of the trouble here is casting. Diminutive James Flynn never has a handle on mercurial Brian, who should dominate his wife, his home and his captive. It doesn’t help that Samantha Wright towers over him. Leonard Roberts manages to impress despite his character, like those of the couple, being not some much ambiguous as underwritten.

AC Wilson’s direction does not appear to have aided the troubling script. The set is awkward and CCTV screens on either side of the stage are underused. Like the play itself, a missed opportunity.

– Triona Adams