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Uncomplicated portrait of police corruptionSummary
Rating
Good
Considering crime drama (and true crime docs) are all over our screens and streaming services, it’s curious how theatre features comparatively little of it. Is it just not considered a natural genre for the medium? In any case, the idea of a police drama on stage was the lure that brought me to Kennington on a wet Tuesday night.
Detective Sergeant Dunderdale (Neil Summerville) is under pressure to solve the case of a double machete murder for which scant evidence has come to light more than a year since two teenage boys were brutally slain in a rural Hertfordshire setting. Dunderdale’s been told that results must now be forthcoming or he will suffer that oft-wielded threat of demotion to uniformed traffic cop.
Dunderdale is reminiscent of David Jason’s Inspector Frost: moustached and old school, with his case notes stored in a lever-arch file tucked under his arm. But it becomes clear very early that the DS has no moral scruples – he’s being pressured to find a suspect, so that’s what he’ll do. Truth and justice don’t get a look-in.
The play’s blurb asks if it’s “acceptable to bend the rules” in such a case, which is a potentially fascinating subject. But Dunderdale defaults instantly to the easy path of framing an almost random suspect, and is never shown questioning his decision to betray every principle he should hold dear. It feels like a missed opportunity to really examine an important issue.
The victim of Dunderdale’s unscrupulous actions is Joseph Wade (John Lutula) who happens to “match” vague eyewitness accounts of a “very black” man seen in the vicinity. There’s zero physical evidence to link Wade to the murders, but he has a prior conviction for a crime involving a machete, which is all Dunderdale needs to pounce on him and pronounce with certainty that they’ve found their man. Again, there’s no attempt to explore the psychology of this, even when Dunderdale bribes an inmate to testify to a fictitious prison confession while Wade is on remand for possibly manufactured drug possession charges.
If Ian Dixon Potter’s script is unsophisticated, it at least moves the story along in a brisk 70 minutes. We end in a courtroom with opposing sides giving their closing summations. I won’t reveal the verdict, but I’m a sucker for a courtroom drama and this scene ticked reassuringly familiar boxes.
As Dunderdale, Summerville is convincingly single-minded and sure of himself. I just wish there was a chink in his workmanlike determination through which we could get an insight into the emotional consequences of his swift fall into corruption. Elsewhere, there’s some effective multi-roling from the rest of the six-strong cast, and Lutula delivers the play’s final scene with a powerful presentation of a wronged man.
I’d love to see more crime dramas in our theatres, but I hope the next one I go to delves deeper into the human factors that the genre at its best illustrates. Such stories reflect us in extremis – they deserve all the dramatic scrutiny and invention that a rigorous stage production can excel in providing.
Written by: Ian Dixon Potter
Directed by: Phoebe White
Produced by: Golden Age Theatre Company
Burden of Proof plays at the White Bear Theatre until Saturday 1 June. Details can be found here.
