legal drama
aleks.sierz
Rosamund Pike is back. For her first stage appearance since 2010, when she played Hedda Gabler in Adrian Noble’s production for Bath Theatre Royal, the Hollywood superstar has chosen Inter-Alia, Suzie Miller’s follow up to her smash hit Prima Facie, which starred Jodie Cromer and whose London staging was at the Harold Pinter Theatre in 2022.With the same production team, but now at the National Theatre, Miller returns to her chosen milieu – English legal professionals – but now zooms in on the family scene of top judge Jessica Parks (Pike). As before, this is mainly a monologue, running at Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In a dingy room with dilapidated furniture on a dismal Sunday evening, two detectives prepare for an interview. The old hand walks out, with just a little too much flattery hanging in the air, leaving the interrogation in the hands of the up-and-coming thruster, a young woman investigating the disappearance of a young woman. Alone, with just a camera for company (we get the video feed also from hidden cameras too) she awaits the suspect for the showdown.A hit at Edinburgh and now expanded to a tense 70 minutes three-hander, Jamie Armitage’s first play as writer as well as director is a wordy Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Scott Turow published his cunningly-wrought legal thriller in 1987, and Alan J Pakula’s powerful movie version, starring Harrison Ford, appeared in 1990. Enough time has elapsed, perhaps, for Apple TV’s revised version of Presumed Innocent for the streaming age.There’s plenty to like about this eight-episode reincarnation, which casts Jake Gyllenhaal in the lead role of Rusty Sabich, a Chicago prosecutor who seems to have enough on his plate coping with the poisonous internal politics of the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, even before he has to undergo the ordeal of being tried for an Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Directed by Adrian Lyne, Fatal Attraction was the biggest-grossing film of 1987, and gave the world the term “bunny boiler”. Lyne isn’t aboard for Paramount’s new eight-part series, but the film’s screenwriter James Dearden is a major script contributor alongside the show’s creators Kevin J Hynes and Alexandra Cunningham.This isn’t a re-make, more like an expanded Fatal Attraction universe which develops the original story outwards and forwards in time. At its core is the brief affair between Dan Gallagher (Joshua Jackson), a Los Angeles county prosecutor, and Alex Forrest (Lizzy Caplan), who Read more ...
Veronica Lee
“Wagatha Christie” – I salute the bright spark who coined the term – describes, for those who don't follow such fripperies, the social media spat between footballers' wives Rebekah Vardy and Coleen Rooney (married to Jamie and Wayne respectively), which later became the subject of an multimillion-pound court case.In October 2019 Rooney posted a now famous “reveal post” on her social media; for months, she wrote, she had been doing some sleuthing to find out who was leaking stories from her private Instagram account about her and her family to The Sun. By a process of elimination and by Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The 2001 Reese Witherspoon-starring film Legally Blonde, upon which Heather Hach, Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin’s peppy Broadway musical is based, was something of a Trojan horse: a bubblegum-pink comedy with a feminist spine.Now Lucy Moss, co-creator of the juggernaut Six, updates it further with progressive casting choices and a winning kitsch stylisation in this joyous 21st century revival. Malibu princess Elle Woods (Courtney Bowman) has it all: president of her sorority at UCLA, and on the cusp of getting engaged to her dream man, Warner Huntington III (Alistair Toovey). But Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The real-life case of Michael Peterson and the death of his wife Kathleen in 2001 has generated a steady stream of TV documentaries, though this new series from HBO Max (showing on NOW) is the first time anybody has actually dramatised the story. With Colin Firth as Michael and Toni Collette as Kathleen, it’s a compelling mix of conspiracy theory, forensic detective thriller and legal drama, bristling with false trails and tantalising clues.The discovery of Kathleen’s battered and blood-soaked body at the bottom of the staircase at the family’s home in Durham, North Carolina sets the ball Read more ...
Mert Dilek
National statistics tell us that, in the year ending September 2021, 41% of rape victims in England and Wales eventually withdrew their support for prosecution. That justice is not always blind may have something to do with this.Indeed, as the Australian writer Suzie Miller’s searing play Prima Facie demonstrates, its eyes can even look the other way when it comes to sexual assault. First performed in 2019, Miller’s legal monodrama lands in the West End with a transfixing production that also marks a triumphant stage debut for Jodie Comer.Prima Facie takes the form of a monologue Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
After two years away, Abi Morgan’s acclaimed legal drama/juicy soap The Split returns for its third series, reuniting us with the closely knit, or, you might say, incestuous, law firm of Noble Hale Defoe.Ruth Defoe (Deborah Findlay) and her daughters Hannah (Nicola Walker) and Nina (Annabel Sholey) all work at the firm, wearing silky clothes fit for a cocktail party. There’s another daughter, Rose (Fiona Button), the youngest, who, thankfully, is not a lawyer. Hardly a British version of The Good Fight – it's far more conventional, bland and often unconvincing – it’s still highly watchable.So Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The Merchant of Venice is a comedy, you say? Shakespeare, as ever, refuses to be confined to convenient boxes, his best plays’ extraordinary pliability and longevity a testament to the piercing eye he cast towards the slings and arrows that assail humankind. More than most of his works, The Merchant of Venice requires a director to take a stance, especially these days, so as to send the audience in a chosen direction. This is not unique - no text can. nor should, be sacred - but those decisions bubble closer to the surface in The Merchant than perhaps any other play in the canon. Read more ...
Heather Neill
Lucy Bailey's production of Christie's Witness for the Prosecution, first staged at County Hall in 2017, has a few years to make up on The Mousetrap's near 70, but it has already proved its staying power, despite the hiatus of the lockdown months.The venue is inevitably a significant part of its attraction. The courtroom at County Hall - once the chamber which saw the political debates of the Greater London Council - is a magnificent, atmospheric space, standing in for the Old Bailey. A statue of Justice, scales in hand, presides over the action and 12 members of the audience are co-opted as Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Adapted from Ferdinand von Schirach’s bestselling 2011 novel, The Collini Case is a riveting mix of character study and legal drama, carefully blended into a historical perspective reaching forward 60 years from the 1940s. At its core is the so-called Dreher Law, a sinister legacy from the Nazi era which, cunningly evading democratic scrutiny in Germany’s Bundestag, was a device for erasing murders committed under the Third Reich from the records.Directed with sensitivity and acuity by Marco Kreuzpaintner, the story is seen through the eyes of Caspar Leinen (Elyas M’Barek), a naive young Read more ...