Despite seeing evidence to the contrary time and time again, we still tend instinctively to believe that the camera does not lie. The same is true of verbatim dramas, especially those based on court of other tribunal proceedings. The editing is all: we may be getting the truth and nothing but the truth, but still some way short of the whole truth.
    
Emily Mann’s 1984 play, here receiving its UK professional première, deals with the homicide in 1978 of San Francisco’s mayor George Moscone and city supervisor (councillor) and gay activist Harvey Milk by recently resigned fellow supervisor Dan White. White was convicted not of first-degree murder but of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to seven years and eight months in prison, of which he served five years. The thesis of the play is that this was a travesty of justice for crimes motivated in large part by homophobia. It is a thesis with which I am almost entirely in sympathy. Nevertheless, one does not right an allegedly rigged trial by presenting an equally and oppositely rigged dramatisation of it. Mann (whose adaptation of Lorca’s The House Of Bernarda Alba opens at the Almeida next week) allows barely a single remark even remotely charitable towards White to pass without immediate and fervent rebuttal, by dint of intercutting court testimonies with other such testimonies, interviews with various parties, TV news reports and polemical orations by Sister Boom Boom of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
    
To do her and the play justice, she does not caricature what is now known derisively as the “Twinkie defence” (White’s consumption of sugary junk foods such as Twinkies is portrayed as a symptom of his underlying depression, not the cause of his acts), and also mentions that homophobia may have been merely one dimension of a broader political motive (when White tried to withdraw his resignation, Moscone refused to re-appoint him to the city board). However, the latter possibility in particular is given far too scant attention as the play rolls forward juggernaut-like in its unstinting endorsement of the iconography of Milk as gay martyr.
    
Director Joss Bennathan and a cast of 20 or so turn in 100 uninterrupted minutes of strong ensemble work, but if a mural has been covered in whitewash, the picture is not restored by overpainting that in turn with uniform black.

Written for the Financial Times.