Before Someone to Blame even begins I feel weary of reviewing a play so steeped in ‘real life’ and so blatant in its premise of raising awareness for a very particular cause. Because to criticise a verbatim production about the real life story of Sam Hallam seems somehow to also pass judgment on the adorable, allegedly-innocent chubby-faced white boy (whose whiteness is repeatedly named throughout the production as if this is somehow intrinsically linked to his innocence) currently serving jail-time for (not) killing a young (surely also innocent, though less ‘British’, less white, less sweet perhaps) Ethiopian immigrant in Hackney in 2004. Reservations aside, however, while I am in no position to comment on the actual innocence or otherwise of Hallam, I can comment on this production as an ill conceived, badly written piece of propaganda that is unconvincing as both a piece of theatre and presentation of evidence.
Someone to Blame is apparently ‘Sam’s story: word for word’, a play that coincides neatly with the Court of Appeal hearing of Hallam’s case in May this year. The production is naked in its intentions to convince us of Hallam’s innocence, to raise awareness, to educate; a standard verbatim production– and while these imperatives certainly make it difficult to produce a good piece of theatre that transcends didacticism, they are no excuse for the lack of imagination and innovation evident in Berry-Hart’s writing and Mercatali’s school-play-style direction.
Though verbatim theatre is not written as such, but rather collated, framed and re-presented; Someone to Blame fails to employ any visual or spoken intertextuality, layering or narrative complexity – instead the play follows a tedious and repetitive linear narrative from the (not) crime to today, played out by a small cast of often mediocre actors and narrated (though narration is wholly unnecessary) by the omniscient and patronizing head of Hallam’s current legal team. (And it is in this narrator role that Keith Hill unwittingly provides the only rupture in the play’s never-questioned portrayal of The Truth, by repeatedly forgetting his lines.)
Verbatim theatre, like documentary photography, is a claim to authority - where here the actors fulfill the photographer’s role of apparent non-mediation, presenting texts and events as they really happened. However, like documentary photography, this kind of political theatre is also produced through framing – and while the better examples of the genre present spoken or written texts with a complexity that mirrors real life events, Someone to Blame presents an incredibly narrow, one-sided view of The Truth of the Sam Hallam case, without ever acknowledging its own severe narrative limitations and biases. Indeed the character and tragedy of the murdered victim of the crime of which Sam has been accused is only casually mentioned, mostly in the last five minutes of the play.
Despite these limitations of structure and script there are still some noteworthy performances from the ensemble cast. Robin Crouch presents an excellent and moving portrayal of Sam, working within very strict script limitations – so much so that I very nearly shed a tear at his overwrought last line (PS I’m innocent). Both Vincent Jerome and Bradley Taylor show moments of real sensitivity portraying various local ‘youths’ and Debra Baker does a commendable job of playing Hallam’s nerve-wracked, grief-stricken and almost wholly ineffectual mother.
Someone to Blame, then, does have its moments of genuinely affecting translations of others’ testimonies, letters and speech. However, as a whole it remains stuck in its need to ‘tell the truth’ about this ongoing (mis)trial, never transcending the language and imaging of Hallam’s existing public campaign – never producing any of the intricacy that might allow for both good theatre and vehicle for social change. Instead Someone to Blame produces neither, but engenders at most a low-level sympathy for the ‘real’ Sam, at worst the same level of disinterest one comes away with after sitting through any other tedious play.
