The first thing we see is the feet,
sticking out from beneath the huge, over-laden double desk whose
underside Clarence Darrow is hammering, much as he hammered at the
underside of American jurisprudence for half a century, trying to keep
parts like the First Amendment in working order.
Kevin Spacey has already played a thinly fictionalised version of this
great American lawyer, namely defence counsel Henry Drummond in
Inherit The Wind, and Spacey’s
voice this time assumes a gravelliness akin to that of Drummond’s
big-screen incarnation Spencer Tracy. The predominant trait of his
delivery is its force; “barnstorming” is the word. Perhaps he is
overestimating the volume it takes to ensure clarity throughout the Old
Vic’s reconfigured in-the-round space; perhaps he is trying to pull the
walls in to create greater intimacy (he sporadically succeeds, ranging
around the stage and up and down the main aisle, constantly taking his
arguments to specific audience members); perhaps it is simply a
character choice. Whatever the cause, it grows wearing.
Yet you come to feel that what is grinding you
down is not Darrow’s bull-roaring, but the iniquities against which he
is railing: the series of free-speech and conspiracy-to-murder cases he
defended as a labour and then a criminal lawyer, prosecutions motivated
by a will to suppress worker activism and by plain racism. His most
famous briefs were his defence of the right to teach Darwin in the
Scopes “monkey trial” of 1925 (as dramatised in
Inherit The Wind) and of the
“thrill killers” Leopold and Loeb the previous year. Darrow is candid
about not always winning his cases, but he boasts (not entirely
factually) that of 102 people he defended on capital charges, he never
lost one to Death Row.
Again and again he drives home his salt-of-the-earth progressive views:
“There is no such thing as ‘crime’ as that word is generally
understood… the real cause of crime is poverty”, and above all the
simple core motive “to temper justice with mercy”. This charity
seemingly affects Spacey himself: when a punter’s mobile phone went off
on press night he kept his response, “If you don’t answer that, I
will,” down to a growl. His Darrow isn’t a heroic figure, running to
seed with a lock of lank hair hanging across his high forehead like an
incipient combover, but he is undoubtedly a hero.
Written for the Financial
Times.