Sticks and Stones

Bewleys Cafe Theatre, Dublin

“It’s not as black and white as you think it is,” says attorney Alan Klein to his prospective client, a racist cop accused of a hate crime.

First staged in LA not long after the Rodney King riots, Drew McWeeney’s and Scott Swan’s short 1994 legal drama suggests otherwise, both in concern and schematic simplicity. A sketch about justice and racism in the US, it attempts to give its argument some thorns, but whether it’s the heat of its creation or the sensitivities of its audience, they are quickly pruned away. The cop, a seething veteran called Di Palma, played a little timidly by Laurence Lowry, is saddled from the start with the throwaway epithets of a card-carrying bigot. “I can’t believe what’s coming out of your mouth,” says Owen Mulhall’s Jewish lawyer, and the problem is that neither can we. A defiant cop justifying his actions in murky circumstances is one thing; a nationally vilified pariah spilling casual hatred from his introduction is another, and characterisation throughout seems to have been sacrificed on the altar of an issue drama.

There are glimmers here of a more sophisticated play that might have served a complicated theme. A self-aggrandising Klein, seemingly more interested in tabloids and TV cameras than the courtroom, needs the tainted cop as much as Di Palma needs a Jewish lawyer the way everyone in Beverley Hills wants a “spic” gardener. But tension between complicity and morality is sapped away through clunky exposition and unlikely finger-wagging, with the lawyer, unusually, becoming the conscience of the drama.

Mulhall and Lowry are solid presences, but in a play so fixated on race, their characters’ own ethnicities register dimly. Dialogue between the pair is batted back and forth like a leisurely tennis rally, and director Les Martin looks for opportunities to enliven proceedings with a sudden yell or a grabbed lapel.

The drama ends with a hand-wringing gesture towards defending the indefensible in a free society. But while racism has hardly disappeared in the years since its debut, the play is most reassuring where it looks most dated. Considering his victim, Di Palma summarises the limits of an African American’s opportunities: he wasn’t going to cure cancer, he wasn’t going to be the next president. After Rodney King, those words seem appalling. After Barack Obama, they seem defeated. Until March 13