Horton Foote's short play, staged by the Misery/ Loves Company in the theatrically under-resourced space of the New Theatre in Essex Street, adapted from the author's screen version, itself adapted from a William Faulkner short story, comes across as a flimsy dramatic construction about why Stonewall Jackson Fentry, an impoverished loner in rustic Mississippi, causes promising young lawyer Stevens to lose his first case. It needs far more theatrical resources to render it persuasive than are available to its current production.
Fentry is the jury member who prevents a "not guilty" verdict being returned on respectable Mr Davis, who shot young Buck Thorpe dead for running off with his daughter. It was just something he had to do, and maybe that had something to do with the fact that Fentry had taken in and sheltered an exhausted and pregnant Sarah Eubanks (nee Thorpe) when she collapsed outside the saw-mill where he worked as watchman one Christmas Eve.
Sean Patrick Donlon does not help to overcome the sense of contrivance in the piece by providing direction so slow that a one-act play might be performed in some of the many unpregnant pauses in the evening, nor by leaving his actors motionless and gazing upwards diagonally rather like the folk in the Angelus which precedes the six o'clock news on RTE One. Seldom do any of the players get a chance to establish or develop their characterisations or even to make significant contact with one another. They demonstrate sincerity and commitment to the task in hand, but need to be allowed to do rather more than that, and at a greater, more engaging pace.
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