The Exonerated

The Exonerated, at the Charing Cross theatre, examines the flaws in the American justice system through six case studies of wrongfully charged death row prisoners. Despite sweeping up a host of human rights awards on US soil, the play fails to resound as a meaningful piece of theatre. Eulogy finds out why.

It’s tricky to make people feel indifferent about death row. Naturally, the topic inspires fervent emotions: outrage, frustration, a strong sense of injustice – or even feelings of retribution if you’re partial to the ‘life for a life’ argument. But this production of The Exonerated, supported by Amnesty International, is bound to leave many of us alarmingly unmoved, as it preaches an impotent moral message to the converted without the wings of artistic merit.

The play is structured around the stories of six ex-prisoners, moving sharply between monologues and scenes of courtroom and police interrogation. Many of the characters are permanently on stage, and the set is fairly minimalist, featuring little more than a few chairs. Translucent curtains and selective spotlighting provide some separation between the narratives, but mostly it’s left for you to imagine the rest.

Each of the characters relates their own unique experience of the harsh life of an innocent prisoner on death row. We have Gary, an organic farmer who was sentenced for murdering both his parents, and Robert, one of three African-American ex-prisoners who collectively feel that their convictions came as a direct result of their skin colour. There is Kerry, a bright but vulnerable Texan who went down because of an embittered judge, whose experience of abuse and tragedy behind bars left him a shadow of his former self. And then there’s Sunny, a bubbly hippie who was unfortunate enough to get caught up, along with her husband, in a criminal shoot-off. She was given the brunt of the blame and sixteen years in jail; her husband was never freed and was subjected to a harrowingly botched death by electric chair.

Predictably, what all of the characters have in common is a pretty terrible experience of the justice system. Many were forced into confessing or were exploited by the system for being confused and fragile in the face of trauma. Much of the evidence that would have prevented their convictions was discarded or ignored, and many of their fates were determined by authority figures whose decisions were blurred by prejudice, grudges or simple incompetence.

All very worthy tales, of course, ones which would make most rationally-minded people very sceptical indeed about the validity of the death penalty. But – and maybe it’s because we’re British and this is an American script – we know it’s a flawed system already. There is little more to this production than a very thinly veiled campaign message. The characters are devoid of real depth and inspire a shallow level of emotional attachment; the style, which makes use of cross-cutting, and repetition for unsubtle emphasis, seems to have been dreamed up in an A level drama class. And all of this is supplemented by some pretty poor American accents, and acting which, on the whole, leaves a lot to be desired. (Fans of the 90s band Eternal, however, might enjoy the addition of Kelle Bryan as Georgia, an inmate’s wife).

The Christian overtones are another aspect which, perhaps, sat better with an American audience. Prisoners performing miracles, attributing their freedom to God and identifying His presence in DNA are not really the kinds of behaviours we tend to see in mature English dramas. Being on death row would probably make believers out of a lot of us, but the feeling of religious righteousness, at least for me, undermines the vivid moral righteousness which is the crux of the issue. Muddying ethical clarity with religion kind of defeats the point.

So what I come away with as a member of an audience (which to be honest, barely filled half of the theatre) was that the American justice system is, as the poet Delbert put it in the play, ‘fucked’. There was no meaningful, original comment here, just something we all knew already said in a way we’ve heard before. The fact that the testimonies are based on truth – interviews, letters and transcripts – fails to lend it any weight. And as a play about race, which it was on many levels, the comment was, again, hackneyed and lacking in vigour. If you want to see a truly modern, penetrating piece of theatre which examines racial issues in America, I urge you to go up the road to see Clybourne Park instead.

Good luck to the Exonerated for getting the message out there, and hopefully it has affected some kind of change on the other side of the Atlantic. But this production is likely to affect little more than the Charing Cross Theatre’s ticket sales – and understandably so.

"the characters are devoid of real depth and inspire a shallow level of emotional attachment"

"There was no meaningful, original comment here, just something we all knew already said in a way we've heard before"