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The Review - THEATRE by ILLTYD HARRINGTON
Published: 13 March 2008

Gallows humour at the Bailey

LEGAL FICTIONS
Savoy Theatre

JOHN Mortimer followed his father into the Law and for more than 50 years he has shared much of that legal genetic panorama with us on stage, radio and TV.
Of course Horace Rumpole “of the Bailey” has for 30 years stood out as a character that Dickens could have written, so Legal Fictions is perhaps a pleasant exercise in nostalgia.
It consists of two plays: The Dock Brief, which started life on BBC radio in 1957, and Edwin, another radio play which subsequently came to our screens via Anglia television.
The Dock Brief follows Morganhall (Edward Fox), who the prisoner Fowle (Nicholas Woodeson) picks out from a bench of available barristers. The more successful ones flee the court before the judge allows the defendent to choose. This was a low cost arrangement prior to legal aid.
Morganhall, after 14 years of professional sterility, believes his moment has come.
His imagination and confidence race ahead with Fowle, a self-confessed wife murderer, joining in the pre-trial rehearsal.
Fox puts him through his paces and Woodeson joins in enthusiastically. The outcome is ingenius: a duet rather than a dialogue which both actors repeat in the second play.
Edwin, by contrast, is set in a bright and beautiful country garden of the retired high court judge Sir Fennimor Truscott (Edward Fox), who conducts his daily life in the vocabulary and posturings of the high court.
Sir Fennimor believes that his neighbour Tom (Woodeson) “rogered his wife Margaret” (Polly Adams) when he was immersed in Jewish prudence.
Fox looks and sounds like those withered and clipped voice princes of the then contemporary high court. His son Edwin is about to visit but is he the “fruit of his loins”?
All the same, the coupling of these two plays provides some good laughs, English eccentricity, and Mortimer’s humanity. But your brain will not be taxed.
That was then, now we have a different agenda.
The present Lord Chief Justice does not live in a house called Gallows Corner and apparently has a regular swim like the rest of us in Highgate Ponds.
Until April 26
CNJ Booking line
0870 040 0070

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