REVIEW
✭✭☆☆☆ 2/5
THE VERDICT
Palace Theatre, Westcliff on Sea
31st January - 4th February 2023
✭✭☆☆☆ 2/5
THE VERDICT
Palace Theatre, Westcliff on Sea
31st January - 4th February 2023
I arrived at the theatre a little later than planned, thanks to being stuck in one of those temporary traffic light situations that leave you waiting for ever to move and then just as you do, you snail pace forwards just enough for the lights to change yet again and you're stuck for what seems like another endless stint in time. Little did I know it, but this was a theme that would run throughout the rest of the evening.
I got to my seat with about 3 mins to curtain up, except curtain was already up and the audience were engaged in what was happening on stage. I checked my watch....no, I was on time....this was one of those 'let's set the scene before curtain up' kind of scenarios and the couple sitting next to me assured me that I hadn't missed much, just that the guy on stage - who was now taking off his shirt - started off lying on the floor, looked a bit rough and had a bottle of booze on his desk. Ah, the old cliched alcoholic routine. Got it. Up to scratch.
It transpires that this is Frank Galvin, a washed up veteran lawyer whose Boston based office is on the 5th Floor and looking as shabby as its occupant. Is that some kind of industrial cling film on those windows? Not really important. What is important is the storyline which envelopes over the course of a pretty long Act 1 (almost and hour and half).
The play is set in Boston, late November in 1980 and is based on the powerful bestselling courtroom thriller that inspired a multi–Academy Award-Nominated film starring Paul Newman. Being a washed up alcoholic and not really getting any decent jobs or cases of late, Frank is given a chance to redeem himself when he is given what appears to be an open and shut medical malpractice case involving a 27 year old mother who has been left in a vegetative state during childbirth, which obviously no one thinks he can win. He's given what appears to be a bribe from the Bishop of the Diocese that everyone, and I mean everyone, tells him that he would be a fool to refuse but no, despite it being $300,000 and more than enough money to help his client, the mother of the comatose woman, be able to look after her he reckons there's something fishy going on and decides to take on the big guns and fight the case with the chance of ultimately winning $5m.
In the meantime, we get a feel for Frank's back story when we are introduced to characters such as Moe Katz (Vincent Pirillo), his life long mentor and work partner and Eugene Meehan the landlord of the neighbourhood bar. We discover that Frank is unsurprisingly separated from his wife and that his father was also an alcoholic. He's also straight in there with the ladies, so when Donna St Laurent turns up at the bar looking for work, Frank goes into full on flirt mode.
The problem, I found, with this play is that it has to be very wordy in order for the audience to understand what's going on outside of the on-stage action. In a film we can visit hospitals and bars and offices in a blink of an eye, but on stage that's not possible. This screenplay adaption does its best to deliver but it just ends up being wordy and cumbersome and portrays characters that we can't truly invest in because they're not given the time to be able to develop. That said, Jason Merrells does a pretty good job in his role of the troubled, yet determined, lawyer. It's a big old cast and even the director gets involved, playing the parts of bar-keeper, Eugene, and also Daniel Crowley MD. Fellow casting director, Richard Walsh, also gives himself two roles, playing the Bishop Brophy as well as the Judge and to be fair, both actors are rather good in these roles, allowing themselves a chance to show off their Boston and Irish accents to boot. It's a fairly strong cast too but there were quite a few seemingly lost and fumbly lines from some characters.
In Act 2 we have the Court Scene with the set looking impressive and we get to the nitty gritty of the piece. (I'm not sure but I sense that there may have been issues with spacing and the steep rake that the Palace Theatre stage presents.) This should be the most thrilling part of the play but oh how it dragged on. The case was pretty much cut and dried from the off and it was fairly obvious what had happened to the poor woman whilst giving birth. However, points were laboured (excuse the pun) to the point that I felt like shouting out myself what had happened before they even dragged on the poor nervous wreck of a nurse as a witness. Overall, I just didn't feel invested enough in any of the characters to really care too much about what happened to any of them, sadly, and despite some fabulous performances I was pretty relieved when the play ended around 11pm.
I quickly jotted down a line in the play taken from the Judge towards the end of the play asking the lawyers to summarise; he says "......it should be long enough to cover the subject and short enough to be interesting." I'll just leave that there.
Review: Kim Tobin
I got to my seat with about 3 mins to curtain up, except curtain was already up and the audience were engaged in what was happening on stage. I checked my watch....no, I was on time....this was one of those 'let's set the scene before curtain up' kind of scenarios and the couple sitting next to me assured me that I hadn't missed much, just that the guy on stage - who was now taking off his shirt - started off lying on the floor, looked a bit rough and had a bottle of booze on his desk. Ah, the old cliched alcoholic routine. Got it. Up to scratch.
It transpires that this is Frank Galvin, a washed up veteran lawyer whose Boston based office is on the 5th Floor and looking as shabby as its occupant. Is that some kind of industrial cling film on those windows? Not really important. What is important is the storyline which envelopes over the course of a pretty long Act 1 (almost and hour and half).
The play is set in Boston, late November in 1980 and is based on the powerful bestselling courtroom thriller that inspired a multi–Academy Award-Nominated film starring Paul Newman. Being a washed up alcoholic and not really getting any decent jobs or cases of late, Frank is given a chance to redeem himself when he is given what appears to be an open and shut medical malpractice case involving a 27 year old mother who has been left in a vegetative state during childbirth, which obviously no one thinks he can win. He's given what appears to be a bribe from the Bishop of the Diocese that everyone, and I mean everyone, tells him that he would be a fool to refuse but no, despite it being $300,000 and more than enough money to help his client, the mother of the comatose woman, be able to look after her he reckons there's something fishy going on and decides to take on the big guns and fight the case with the chance of ultimately winning $5m.
In the meantime, we get a feel for Frank's back story when we are introduced to characters such as Moe Katz (Vincent Pirillo), his life long mentor and work partner and Eugene Meehan the landlord of the neighbourhood bar. We discover that Frank is unsurprisingly separated from his wife and that his father was also an alcoholic. He's also straight in there with the ladies, so when Donna St Laurent turns up at the bar looking for work, Frank goes into full on flirt mode.
The problem, I found, with this play is that it has to be very wordy in order for the audience to understand what's going on outside of the on-stage action. In a film we can visit hospitals and bars and offices in a blink of an eye, but on stage that's not possible. This screenplay adaption does its best to deliver but it just ends up being wordy and cumbersome and portrays characters that we can't truly invest in because they're not given the time to be able to develop. That said, Jason Merrells does a pretty good job in his role of the troubled, yet determined, lawyer. It's a big old cast and even the director gets involved, playing the parts of bar-keeper, Eugene, and also Daniel Crowley MD. Fellow casting director, Richard Walsh, also gives himself two roles, playing the Bishop Brophy as well as the Judge and to be fair, both actors are rather good in these roles, allowing themselves a chance to show off their Boston and Irish accents to boot. It's a fairly strong cast too but there were quite a few seemingly lost and fumbly lines from some characters.
In Act 2 we have the Court Scene with the set looking impressive and we get to the nitty gritty of the piece. (I'm not sure but I sense that there may have been issues with spacing and the steep rake that the Palace Theatre stage presents.) This should be the most thrilling part of the play but oh how it dragged on. The case was pretty much cut and dried from the off and it was fairly obvious what had happened to the poor woman whilst giving birth. However, points were laboured (excuse the pun) to the point that I felt like shouting out myself what had happened before they even dragged on the poor nervous wreck of a nurse as a witness. Overall, I just didn't feel invested enough in any of the characters to really care too much about what happened to any of them, sadly, and despite some fabulous performances I was pretty relieved when the play ended around 11pm.
I quickly jotted down a line in the play taken from the Judge towards the end of the play asking the lawyers to summarise; he says "......it should be long enough to cover the subject and short enough to be interesting." I'll just leave that there.
Review: Kim Tobin