Inherit the Wind

Since some 46 per cent of Americans reportedly believe that Darwin got it wrong, and a fair number agree with the “fine biblical scholar” quoted in Inherit the Wind as saying that the world was created on October 23, 4004 BC at 9am, you can’t call Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s 54-year-old play particularly dated. Over here a greater proportion doubtless regards evolution as fact, not theory — but there’s still much in Trevor Nunn’s able revival to absorb any British theatregoer, notably a courtroom scene that brings Kevin Spacey and David Troughton into near-mortal combat.

Spacey is Henry Drummond, a barely disguised version of Clarence Darrow, the lawyer who came to Tennessee in 1925 to defend John Scopes, a teacher accused of flouting state law by instructing children in Darwinism. Troughton is Matthew Harrison Brady, an equally blatant clone of William Jennings Bryan, the demagogue who led the prosecution.

Unsurprisingly, the “Monkey Trial” became a national story, thanks not only to their eminence but to the reports of H.L. Mencken, here Mark Dexter’s suavely cynical E.K. Hornbeck, who memorialised Bryan as “a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without shame or dignity” and the trial as “intolerable buffoonery”.

Both principals are strong enough to justify the revival of a play better known, like many these days, in its film version.

Spacey’s Drummond has white hair, a parchment face, stooped shoulders and a painful walk, but his most unelderly wits and wit fizz round Rob Howell’s set: a tunnel of small-town doors imprinted with trees that neatly morphs into that courtroom. And Troughton’s massive, paunchy, infinitely vain Brady trundles about, looking like a dinosaur that has miraculously survived its relatives’ extinction, and booming out his syllables as if to rival the crashing meteor that killed them.

I’m a sucker for that endangered genre the courtroom scene, and few come better than the one in which Spacey puts his foe on the stand and, incisively quizzing him on the Bible, reduces him to blustering confusion. But the play has its weaknesses.

For instance, the authors clearly felt it necessary to appease Broadway audiences by introducing romance into what they must have thought an awfully masculine play. So Sam Phillips’s mild, self-effacing Cates, as the heretic Scopes is renamed, adores Sonya Cassidy’s sweet, meek Rachel, who happens to be the daughter of the local hellfire preacher, a crazed tele-evangelist born before his time. And that seems pretty contrived, especially when Brady forces the girl to bear witness against her lover.

Again, there are over-obviously didactic speeches in praise of freedom of ideas — “a thought is like a child inside our body, and if it dies part of you dies too,” says Rachel as she leaves her oppressive father — that had more resonance in what was, back in 1955, McCarthyite America. But you forgive the occasional clunkiness. That’s partly because Nunn again displays his ability to handle large casts, here crowds of 30 or 40 singing hymns and waving Bible Belt banners — but mostly because watching an urbane Spacey tame an increasingly edgy Troughton is as mesmerising as watching a veteran matador skilfully skewer an enormous bull.
The Times