Clarence Darrow

Saturday 7th July 2014

Clarence Darrow is Kevin Spacey’s swansong at the Old Vic, and boy, what a swansong! This one-man show about one of America’s most famous lawyers – a defender of the defenceless – provides plenty of opportunity for an electrifying final hoorah.

Probably one of my favourite dresses
worn by HM The Queen

And so, to the Old Vic, went Jacqueline and I on Saturday night, after a diverting afternoon at Kensington Palace. As a brief nod to the glorious theatre of monarchy, I very much recommend the current exhibition, ‘Fashion Rules,’ showing royal gowns worn by the Queen, Princess Margaret, and Princess Diana. The Queen’s dresses from the 1950s were by far my favourite – small-waisted and full-skirted, creating the perfect silhouette. These were strangely timeless, unlike Princess Diana’s dresses from the 1980s, which though the height of fashion at the time – shoulder-padded, bright-coloured, and sparkling – now seemed dated and outlandish.

The nicest of Princess Diana's dresses -
very Dynasty

A few years’ ago at the V&A, I saw an exhibition of ball-gowns, including Princess Diana’s pearled Elvis dress. I had two criticisms – one, without their original wearers, the dresses lost their character; two, the dresses were far bigger than most of the mannequins used to display them – a reassuring reminder of the curves and contours of ‘real women.’ This was not the case at Kensington. The mannequins fitted the dresses. The information panels showed the Royals wearing each dress. There were also video clips of The Queen, Princess Margaret, and Princess Diana in the fashions of each decade, restoring a sense of personality to the display.

Filled with cake and plenty of ice-cream, we made our way to the Southbank. Strangely, curtain up was at 9pm. After the shenanigans of the previous week, we made sure our phones were well and truly switched off for Mr Spacey.The Old Vic has been arranged in a round for this show. The proscenium arch stage has been replaced with tiers of seats. This had the fortunate result of making our seats in the front row of the gods seem much less far away than usual! In the centre of the round was a small square of set, containing an untidy office, full of unpacked boxes and unorganised paperwork. From underneath the desk in this office, Mr Spacey emerged to kick-start the play...

While sorting through boxes and discovering memorabilia from his most famous cases, Darrow tells the audience about his life and career in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. We learn about his childhood in Ohio, his freethinking parents, and his first steps towards the law. He describes his marriage and move to Chicago, and his growing involvement with the Unions. He talks us through his renowned battles: his representation of James and John McNamara, accused of dynamiting the headquarters of the Los Angeles Times; his defence of Dr Ossian Sweet, a black man charged with killing a white man when protecting his home; and his role in the Scopes Monkey Trial, when a Tennessee teacher was put on trial for teaching Evolution Theory in a state-funded school. Darrow expounds his opinions of the law and the origins of crime in poverty. The play ends with the spectre of the Leopold and Loeb trial, where two privileged teenage boys were accused of murdering a fellow classmate, simply for the thrill.

Kevin Spacey has played Darrow twice before – in a 1991 PBS movie, Darrow, and in Inherit the Wind at the Old Vic in 2009. He certainly inhabits the role, capturing the audience’s attention from the first and holding all spellbound. Here was a man with an extraordinary story to tell. I was startled by how quickly each half passed. At no moment did the momentum stop and attention wane. Spacey’s physicality helped. His Darrow was always pacing about the stage – tidying boxes in his office, gesticulating, shifting furniture, showing round photographs of defendants. He was also unnerving. What an experience it must have been to be sitting in the first few rows, closest to the set! Darrow immersed the audience in his tales, using them as props, whether as all-white jurors in the trial of a black man, or Presbyterians, dismissed from an ideal jury for inflexibility. He pointed at audience members; he shook their hands; at one point, he even sat down in the front row, between two terrified girls. This unpredictability kept everyone, even those in the gods, at the edge of their seats.

Spacey is very effective at portraying Darrow as the tireless hero: a clever, driven defender of those oppressed by the powerful. In one of the most moving episodes in the play, Darrow re-enacts his cross-examination of a witness, who has lost a leg working in gruelling conditions in a mine, and who has been denied help by the wealthy mine owners. ‘How old are you?’ he demands, addressing a stool in his office, ‘And when will you be eleven?’ The audience gasps audibly in shock. Darrow is also, however, struggling for something more than justice. He knows some of his clients to be guilty – the McNamara brothers, Leopold and Loeb – yet, he strives to defend them from the death penalty. At the end of the play, he gives an impassioned speech on the importance of mercy above justice.

Spacey, and perhaps David W. Rintels' play itself, is less adept at showing us Darrow’s flaws. Darrow tells us of his divorce from his first wife – her loneliness and his growing indifference. He explains his initial crisis of conscience when coming to the conclusion that the great labour heroes, the McNamara brothers, were guilty. He speaks of the accusations he faced of bribing jurors. Yet, perhaps because these tales are told in the light of experience, it is difficult to fully portray the immediacy of Darrow’s feelings: his soul-searching, self-doubt, and fear. For a man famed for seeing all sides of the story, sometimes he seems far too assertive in his judgements. A little more vulnerability would further enhance the magnetism of this performance.

All in all, however, Spacey is a joy to watch. I cannot think of a better way to bow out from his directorship.

While you might think that Spacey could provide sufficient star-wattage himself for an evening, the Old Vic audience was not devoid of celebrities either. Sneaking in at the last moment, surrounded by minders, was Iron Man himself: Robert Downey Junior. I was curious to note that he seems much less bulky in real life and that he seems to possess two phones – one, no doubt, a superhero device. Hmm... who knew that Iron Man was a friend of Lex Luther..? I’m sure that’s not canon!   

Not listening to Queen Clarisse in
The Princess Diaries!
'A Queen never crosses her legs'

Following standard practice, Jacqueline and I gathered merrily at the stage door after our show to pass on our congratulations to the great man. It soon became clear, however, that Mr Spacey does not sign autographs. Nor does he even leave from the stage door. A cheerful security guard told us so. (We tried not to listen). A rather less cheerful sign on the stage door told us so. (We still shut our ears). An extremely cheerless stage door manager told us so... (We all went home). We were not too disappointed, however. We did meet a lovely bunch of committed Spacey-fans, including some who had travelled all the way from Holland to see their hero and queued up for standing tickets at seven in the morning. We also spotted Tracey Emin, who looks disappointingly ordinary in real life and was probably on the way home to her unmade bed...

It was three o’clock before we made it home, and it was a good job that the Queen was in France because there was much singing of musical theatre, going down the Mall! One may not have been amused!