Clarence Darrow review - Kevin Spacey shines in barnstorming performance

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/jun/05/clarence-darrow-kevin-spacey-review-old-vic-london

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Kevin Spacey gives a big, barnstorming performance as the famed American lawyer, Clarence Darrow. But that is entirely appropriate for a man who was a fervent champion of the poor and oppressed and of whom it was once said, after he had been accused of corruption: "Darrow doesn't bribe juries: he just frightens them to death."

Spaceyhas been here before. He played Darrow in a 1991 PBS film and, on stage at the Old Vic, in a 2009 production of Inherit the Wind. But David W Rintels's one-man play, first performed by Henry Fonda, makes different demands in that Darrow is looking back over his entire life. And, in the Old Vic's new configuration, Spacey is having to perform in the round.

He does this magnificently. His Darrow has a slight stoop and sagging walk as if his knees were buckling under the weight of his moral indignation. But the dominant impression is one of ferocious energy as Spacey roams around the cluttered law-office set and periodically bursts out of its confines to eyeball members of the audience as if they were jurors he was seeking to persuade or harangue.

What emerges clearly, both from the text and in Spacey's performance, is Darrow's renegade spirit. As the son of small-town Ohio freethinkers, he was always on the side of the weak and strenuously argued that the real cause of crime is poverty and ignorance. He was also a showman: championing the cause of Pennsylvania coalminers, you see how he shocks a jury, and us, by gradually revealing that a supposedly seditious striker is a damaged 11-year-old working a 14-hour shift 365 days a year. And even when Darrow got into trouble, after having supposedly corrupted jurors, he used his ingenuity to get off the hook. Confronting in court an aide caught red-handed planting money on a juror, he shrewdly asks: "Would I have given you a cheque?"

The first half shows us Darrow the Chicago-based radical. The second half manipulates chronology to tackle some of Darrow's most famous 1920s cases: his defence of a black doctor protecting his family against the Ku Klux Klan, his support of an evolutionist teacher in the Scopes monkey trial and his unfashionable determination to save two privileged young killers from the death sentence in the Leopold and Loeb case. Spacey is especially fine in this last instance, softening Darrow's tone to enter a moving plea for mercy over societal revenge.

The play doesn't tell us much of Darrow's private life other than that he left his first wife and, even after he married his adored second wife, remained a philanderer. But under Thea Sharrock's skilful direction Spacey fills in the gaps and gives us a rich picture of a buccaneering nonconformist who prided himself on saving 102 individuals from the death penalty and who was always ready to take on privilege and power.

It is a mighty performance that brings out Darrow's bravura humanitarianism and it leaves one hoping that, even after Spacey hands over the Old Vic to Matthew Warchus next year, it will not be his farewell to the London stage.

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