Agatha Christie is, as many people know, one of the most popular and beloved British authors. Theatrically, her most famous piece is The Mousetrap (review forthcoming after I see it next week), but an ongoing production, begun in 2017, is her play Witness for the Prosecution, running at London County Hall, and directed by Lucy Bailey. The play revolves largely around a courtroom drama testing the innocence or guilt of Albert Vole—and the physical space of the County Hall ideally suits the performance.

Witness for the Prosecution follows the trial of the young and attractive Albert Vole, who is accused of murdering Emily French—a wealthy woman in her mid-late fifties whom he had befriended. Shortly after French changes her will to leave the bulk of her fortune to Vole, she is brutally murdered. The questions becomes whether Vole killed her for the money, whether he is the victim of unfortunate circumstances, or whether there’s some more sinister conspiracy swirling around. Vole manages to charm many of the people in the play, including Mr. Myers, who takes his defense case and passionately argues for his innocence. Myers does contend with the prosecutorial barrister, Sir Wilfred Robart, but perhaps more so with Vole’s wife, Romaine (who isn’t precisely his wife, because she was—supposedly, at least—already married when she “married” Vole to get out of Berlin and to England), who gives quite different testimony on the stand than she had told the police and Myers before. The jury—a dozen audience members—have to ultimately decide the question of Vole’s guilt or non-guilt.

The space of the County Hall—no longer the seat of London county government—is one of the best potential spaces in which this play could be performed because the physical set up of the space resembles a court room. Where I sat in the gallery gave an excellent view of the entire performance space from above (see the picture), which repurposes the seats where the heads of the London county government (I don’t know their proper titles) had once sat as the seat for the judges, and repurposes the seats for the county officials as seats for the audience. With a purpose built stage in the middle of the space, there is a tight, formal fit of the stage within this space created originally for official business. On the stage itself, the wooden platform has some degree of malleability, as it becomes Myers’ office, the court room floor, and even the execution space for the opening scene playing out Vole being hanged. But the reason the space works well is precisely that it is a repurposed official space, a space that is imbued through its history and form with the appearance of authority, an appearance lent to the theatrical set up of the play.

The performances in the play were excellent, and the rollercoaster of contradictions and changes in how the various characters behaved was consistently effective at bringing the audience along for the ride. George Jones’ performance as Leonard Vole, for instance, perfectly brought us along with the idea of his innocence, his almost gullible naivety. Of course, Myers (played by Gyuri Sarossy) and his associate Mr. Mayhew (Ewen Cummings) both discuss how charmingly innocent Vole seems to be, but Jones’ performance struck perfect accents of the simplistic cockney who continually blunders into saying potentially incriminating things because he’s so naïve he lacks the criminal cunning to lie. Vole’s most direct counterpoint is his “wife” Romaine (played by Meghan Treadway), who perfectly embodied what her character says about wanting to be hated by the jury and by Myers in order to achieve her goals. Treadway’s confidence and mockingly cavalier attitude to issues of truth, innocence, and justice is especially pointed in its contrast with Sarossy’s earnest faith in the legal system.

The one thing about the performance that left me wanting more was actually Sarossy’s performance—not because he was bad, since he is definitely an excellent actor, but because one element of the performance did not seem entirely justified. When Myers either confronted Romaine in court or discussed her with Mayhew outside the courtroom, Sarossy performed with an intensity and rage that suggested a deep-seated personal animosity to either Romaine individually or to “her type of woman” specifically. But this is never really explained in the play. Based on the passing reference Myers makes to his wife, his own marriage seems relatively happy, so it’s not clear from whence the depths of Myers’ anger comes.