Oscar-winner Adrien Brody makes a freewheelingly charismatic West End debut in the world premiere of a strange American play based on an even stranger true story.
In Lindsey Ferrentino’s uneven drama, the star of The Pianist plays Nick Yarris, who spent 22 years on Death Row in a Pennsylvania prison. Tousled, impossibly lean and charmingly wolfish, Brody surfs each twist and turn of a script that is mostly preoccupied with the stories we tell ourselves as individuals or as a society.
At first Yarris is just one of many men convicted of murder and rape visited by Jackie Schaffer (coolly ironic Nana Mensah), a poetry student with a social conscience. But his ability to quote Salinger and spin a yarn leads to a deeper bond.
A prison procedural about state brutality and shower-shankings shifts into a larky exercise in myth-making, as Yarris talks about accidentally escaping for a jaunt to Florida and his past as a meth-head car thief. Only when friendship blossoms into necessarily chaste romance does he tell Jackie he’s innocent. At which point things turn Kafkaesque and absurd. The gnomic title is borrowed from a 2015 documentary about Yarris’s case, by the way.
Brody coaxes us through it all, including a shower scene in his pants that leads to an 11th-hour narrative bombshell and a dawdling epilogue that suggests Ferrentino doesn’t know how to end things. If he hadn’t chosen to lend his wattage to this play I wonder if it would have gone on in its current form. Notably, it’s premiering at the Donmar, where a star in a quirky product ensures a sellout, rather than in the unforgiving glare of Broadway, or even Shaftesbury Avenue.
Miriam Buether’s set is the other star of Justin Martin’s lively production, trapping the first row of the audience between a white tiled platform – the visiting room and the stage on which Nick performs - and an encircling catwalk. A long window behind alternately reveals a prison corridor, Jackie’s homely kitchen and a lawyer wrestling with Christmas tree lights.
If you book those front row tickets you might be co-opted as “Ted f***ing Bundy” in one of Nick’s stories or a juror in his appeal. The talented ensemble cast patrol the catwalk and the upper gantries, as guards brutally imposing a rule of silence or inmates singing or back-sassing in defiance.
Overall, this is an enjoyably splashy, starry start to Tim Sheader’s reign at the Donmar. But the fact you never really know what’s going to happen is not always a positive. Brody is magnetic and engaging, but much of what unfolds seems daft or fantastical.
Then a post-curtain call video message from Yarris suggests it’s all true. On opening night, Yarris himself was there, upstaging everyone with his generosity and dignity. Truth really is stranger than fiction. But the way star power, novelty, and the respective dynamics of London and New York theatre shake down is stranger still.
Donmar Warehouse, to November 30; donmarwarehouse.com
