Darlinghurst Courthouse, January 7
7/10
Shirley Beiger escaped to obscurity of Melbourne while the going was good; before Sydney suddenly wondered if it and its judicial system been dazzled by her blond curls; dazzled into a “not guilty” verdict in her trial for murdering her lover, Arthur Griffith. Beiger, you see, was a glamorous model.
Sydney Festival’s artistic director, Olivia Ansell, suggested a play about these credulity-stretching 1954 events, whereupon Melanie Tait developed the story and Sheridan Harbridge wrote and directed the script. Enraged by his affairs, Beiger killed Griffiths, a womanising bookmaker, outside Chequers nightclub with a shot from a rifle into his face at point-blank range. At issue was whether she pulled the trigger intentionally, or because he pushed her while she was holding the gun – which happened to be directed at his nose.
While the play interrogates our favouring of human beauty, our jury system and trial by media, that Beiger was not even convicted of manslaughter by the all-male jury is so bizarre that Harbridge chose to craft a zany comedy. Musical hall meets sketch comedy, with the characters little more than puppets.
Sprinkling magic over it all is the fact the show’s performed in the same courtroom as the real 70 years ago. This makes it so full of faint echoes and dusty ghosts that one wonders if making the play such broad comedy was the best solution. Scope for ample humour still existed had it dug a little deeper than the jury – which took all of two hours to acquit Beiger of both murder and manslaughter. Instead, we come to know only a cardboard cut-out Beiger: someone who, in denying the prosecutor’s accusations, could waggle her curls and make innocence the only verdict.
Nonetheless, having opted to keep the story flimsy and zany, Harbridge makes some of it hilarious. When Ryan Morgan’s Detective Blissett takes the stand, for instance, his combination of laconicism and meticulousness in matters of measurement works brilliantly. Later, Morgan, now playing Arthur, joins with Blazey Best’s Gill, a Chequers showgirl, in singing Don’t Be So Reckless over and around the judge, who was in the fact Margaret Beazley, current NSW Governor (and former Court of Appeal president), plucked from the audience, and amiably playing along. (Fedora-wearing audience members also constitute the jury.)
Harbridge has cast her play superbly. The endlessly talented Best also plays Beiger’s manipulative mum, Edith, Amber McMahon is the journalist/narrator, Marco Chiappi the prosecutor who thought he had a conviction in the bag, Anthony Taufa the defence barrister and Maverick Newman is both the gun-supplying friend and keyboard-playing court stenographer.
Sofia Nolan is ideal as Beiger, although it’s a smallish role for most of the play, which brings me back to the point that perhaps there was more to mine here than the laughs. But do see it: it’s an infinitely better way to see the inside of Darlinghurst Courhouse than in handcuffs.
Until January 25.