BWW Reviews: SOMEONE TO BLAME at The Kings Head Theatre, March 9 2012

On the 11th October Essayas Kassahun died. He had been beaten to death by a group of young men. Sam Hallam is serving a life sentence for that murder. These things we know - but then things get complicated.

Tess Berry-Hart's verbatim play (at The Kings Head until 31 March) is constructed from extracts of interviews and documents, with the dialogue oscillating wildly between the street argot of North London teens and the impenetrable terminology of legal procedures. Whilst this contrast heightens the central claim of the play - that young people caught up in a violent incident later became confused about the impact of what they were saying, leading to an innocent kid being found guilty - it makes it tricky for many in the audience. It feels at times like the play is written in two separate languages, neither of which is our own. Fortunately Keith Hill (as campaign leader Paul May) is on hand to guide us through the linguistic jungle, but even he got a bit lost between witness statements at one point on the first night.

The play is powerful, polemical and persuasive, but as drama it has flaws - not insurmountable, because there is always a big market for true-life crime stories, but flaws all the same. Almost everyone in the audience knows the outcome of the piece before taking their seat (many will also know that the case is slated for the Court of Appeal in mid-May). Few will be surprised that disputed eyewitness accounts are at issue or that the police enquiry was somewhat blinkered or that the case was handled poorly by the judge at first instance. These commonplaces of miscarriage of justice cases are established quickly, so what's left to the dramatist is the emotional pull of a typical kid and a salt of the earth family caught up in things they don't understand. At over two hours' duration, the material feels stretched and might work better over 80 minutes without an interval, keeping the emotional tension ratcheted up tight. 

With Keith Hill trooping as a campaigner for justice straight from central casting and Robin Crouch required to be as ordinary as possible as the ordinary-as-possible kid Sam Hallam, it's left to the ensemble to give the production its life as they bring a dizzying array of mumbling teens, aggressive police officers and arrogant lawyers to life. They do this admirably, going on-stage and off-stage sometimes from minute to minute as the whole space is used, placing the public physically in the space occupied in court by its proxy - the jury. 

So there is really only one surprise in this play - the (apparently) perverse verdict brought in at first instance and upheld on appeal. Maybe that is Ms Berry-Hart's intention.

Read about Sam Hallam's Campaign by clicking here.