Just follows Victoria, a regular passerby in a not so regular English town. After finding a man on the ground stabbed in the back with an umbrella, Victoria is accused of this crime by the simple, word-muddling policeman Albert, the blindfolded law, Mrs Wright, and the verse-talking townspeople, even though none of them saw her do it. Victoria takes a stance as the only voice of reason and sanity, but ends up as dead as the cause she is fighting for.
All the performances were strong, but I particularly admired the actress who played Mrs Wright. Her burrowing, twitchy mole-like movements matched up perfectly with the character’s blindness, and her shaking warble of a voice was one the audience easily recognised as belonging to a mad old bat. I also liked the performance and direction of the townspeople, who had perfected bigoted idiocy down to a T.
The play’s stripping down of justice through absurdism allows us to look at it on the most basic, universal of levels. It raises issues surrounding law and its values such as how prejudice can lead to wrongful acquittal, the power of majority rule, and who polices the police. The play is original, interesting, and will certainly get you thinking.
