(Finally updated. Yay!)
Long before the West Wing was even a sparkle in his eye, Aaron Sorkin wrote a play called A Few Good Men.
The idea, he says, came from a story his sister, a military lawyer, told him about a group of soldiers who were facing disciplinary action for assaulting a fellow soldier, in an attempt to “discipline him”.
This was before anyone had ever heard of Abu Ghraib or Deepcut Barracks, and Guantanamo Bay was still important only as a front in the cold war against Castro.
The play itself concerns two young marines, charged with causing the death of a third: shaved, terrified, asphyxiated, possibly poisoned. A victim of the ominous “Code Red”. But who is really responsible? Did they act on orders? If so, whose?
Certain reviews have suggested that the subject matter of this play – abuse advocated by the army – makes this the wrong time to stage it, while I would argue exactly the opposite – it is incredibly timely, and could almost have been written yesterday.
The film, starring Tom Cruise, is fantastic. It is the epitome of the courtroom drama. But this stage production is quite possibly even better. The (relatively) small space of the Theatre Royal, Haymarket adds to the claustrophobic effect, and Michael Pevelka’s stark, steel set performs the very same function as the sweeping vistas of the film.
Rob Lowe is brilliant in the Cruise role – the young, baseball-fixated lawyer Daniel Kaffee who has never seen the inside of a courtroom but is half-heartedly assigned to defend the accused marines. The same sense of almost naivety that he brought to Sam Seaborn in the West Wing serves him very well here.
John Barrowman, while no match at all for Jack Nicholson, plays Colonel Jessep fairly well. That said, his delivery of the play’s trademark line, “You can’t handle the truth”, was almost lost in the arguing between him and Lowe. Whether that is his fault or that of the director, I don’t know. But it’s a little thing.
A very effective element of the production is the brief glimpses of marines in training during scenery changes, which very much reinforces the overpowering presence of the marine code, “Unit, corps, God, country” and the quite how foreign this is to Harvard-educated Kaffee.
I’ve said it before – it was really fascinating to see both this and Mary Poppins in the same afternoon: one a fantastic example of real theatrical drama, the other the epitome of stage spectacle. Both brilliant!
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