I saw Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution roughly one year ago in the London County Hall, under the direction of Lucy Bailey both times. My previous review (which includes a plot summary in the second paragraph) is available here: https://phillipzapkin.com/2024/06/13/agatha-christies-witness-for-the-prosecution-12-june-2024/. It’s interesting to see a trial play twice, because you no longer have to try and figure out whether the defendant, Leonard Vole in this case, is guilty or innocent. Instead, you can focus more on the performance itself.

One thing I was very much struck by with this performance is how much of the acting was done with the performers’ backs to the main/downstage portion of the audience. Of course, Witness is performed on a thrust stage, with audience surrounding three sides of the main performance space, so part of my perception depending on where I was seated, which was the downstage gallery—you can see the angle I was viewing the play from in the stage picture. Of course, in a court room, much of the focus will be directed towards the judge (seated upstage center), the jury (seated upstage right), and the witnesses (seated upstage left). This is all perfectly natural and creates verisimilitude with a real courtroom. However, it means that the actors in the central playing space are frequently directing their attention away from much of the audience. On the one hand, this lends itself to willingly suspending our disbelief, because the play functions more like a proper courtroom. On the other hand, it is traditionally regarded as bad acting strategy to perform away from the audience, who then can’t really see what you’re doing.