Reviewing the evidence

Under Pressure
Bewley's Café Theatre, Dublin
**

If conflict is the soul of drama, Rachel Fehily ought to know her stuff. A barrister and an author of relationship- advice books, she has applied her professional experiences to her first play with the story of a surgeon on trial for the murder of his wife in a sex game gone horribly wrong. All rise; this legal drama is now in session.

The curious result, though, is something that veers unevenly between the sensational and the mundane, as though the wrong elements of a melodrama and a legal procedural were accidentally spliced together. Rather than the cut and thrust of heated cross-examination, or overheated clichés that belong to another culture – Objection, your honour! Badgering the playwright! – we get a pre-trial consultation between the accused and his lawyer, witnessed by the ghost of his wife.

Played by Deborah Pearce, who wears a dressing gown and the red tie used to strangle her, the ghost is a clumsy intrusion on an otherwise realistic premise. She speaks, and sometimes sings, as though delivering an emotive victim-impact statement from beyond the grave. The shame is that she is never allowed to be anything more than a victim: passive and demeaned in life, now watching everything like a mute juror.

Tommy Dillon's ear, nose and throat surgeon is similarly one-note. He is so slick, silvery and remorseless that even his first greeting counts as a crime against dialogue: "The beautiful Helen Collins, la belle dame, role model for so many . . ."

As Collins, Céire O’Donoghue presents an attractively husky, impassive figure, as though channelling her inner Sharon Ní Bheoláin, stating initially that if the case against him cannot be proved “ beyond reasonable doubt” it will leave “no stain on your character”. In truth, there isn’t much to stain.

"Dr Death", as the tabloids have dubbed him, may mock 50 Shades of Grey, which, rather wonderfully, he cites in his defence, but despite late efforts to introduce a soupçon of doubt, the play is conversely all black and white. "Why would I want to kill my wife in such a stupid manner?" he says at one point. You can see why he shouldn't take the witness stand.

Had the production fully abandoned itself to the pleasures of courtroom-
drama tropes or even melodrama, this might all count as a guilty pleasure, but surprisingly, it is compromised by its seriousness. Thick with surface detail – the type of knot on the tie, how much wine was consumed, even the precise address of the accused – it never gets under anyone's skin. "There are many different versions of the truth," counsels the belle dame of criminal law, but here, it's an open and shut case.
Ends June 8th