Theatre review: The Trials

With climate catastrophe seeming more bleakly inevitable by the minute, you'd think the near future looked depressing enough without imagining an even more dystopian version of it; but fair play to Dawn King, whose The Trials goes for it anyway. At some point in the future, climate change has made the air outside unbreathable without masks, droughts and flooding are regular occurrences, and refugees have had to flee much of the planet for the few areas that are still just about habitable. Being the generation that will have to live with the consequences of what the preceding ones did, children and teenagers have seized control, and the twelve young protagonists of King's play have been called to two weeks' jury duty, to judge their elders' crimes. But these aren't politicians or industrialists who wilfully destroyed the environment for profit; all of them were tried long ago, and the spotlight has now moved onto anyone who could be considered to have done less than they could have to stop the disaster.

So the three defendants we see tried were all over 18 by the time a 12-year warning of catastrophe was given in 2018, had an income above a certain bracket, and a carbon footprint over the allowed threshold during those critical dozen years. They each have a few minutes to plead their case, and convince the jury not to sentence them to death.

They're not the only ones under extreme time pressure, as the jury only have 15 minutes to come to a majority verdict after watching the testimony, and there are some among them who are determined to get guilty verdicts across the board, and are willing to waste this time, among other techniques to bully the others into voting their way. The Trials is a Donmar Local production, a scheme to identify and showcase young talent, so the focus of Natalie Abrahami's production is on the dozen young actors whose deliberations take up most of the show. In the current economic climate I can't blame a theatre trying to get bums on seats by whatever means they can, so this cast of "unknowns" just so happens to include Joe Locke and William Gao, two of the leads from Heartstopper, one of the most-discussed new TV shows of the year.

Locke plays Noah, one of the most vocal in favour of all-round guilty verdicts, and he and Jowana El-Daouk's constantly-screaming Gabi soon face off against Mohammad (Francis Dourado,) whose tendency towards leniency puts him in the minority. Forced to try and strike a balance is Ren (Honor Kneafsey,) who's been elected foreperson. They're faced with very different cases: Defendant One (Nigel Lindsay) is an upper-middle class father of three whose defence is that his lifestyle was no worse than anyone else's; Defendant Two (Lucy Cohu) a playwright who actually campaigned for the environment, but whose flights for work purposes put her footprint over thr threshold; and Defendant Three (Sharon Small) actually worked for an oil company, but her contrition is the most genuine.

King's premise is complex: Technically the trials are a matter of necessity, as limited resources mean they are a way of "euthanising" those least useful to society. In practice they seem more motivated by revenge than justice, and the shadowy power organising them are doing something profoundly unfair not just to the accused, but to the child jurors who are being forced to carry life-or-death decisions on their consciences. The analogy used is the Nuremberg trials, but as is pointed out the difference is they were restricted to high-ranking, complicit Nazis; in this dystopian future, it's as if Nuremberg went on to judge the entire population of Germany. In the end it's a system that could only appeal to psychopaths, and only the bloodthirsty Gabi, who runs off eagerly to watch the executions, is left unscathed by the deliberations.

King presents the young generation as justifiably angry, but doesn't put them on a pedestal either. As well as the unseen system that put the trials in place, the jurors themselves are understandably unqualified, and aren't necessarily paying attention to the task at hand: Xander (Gao) is too busy flirting with Ren to pay attention, while Tomaz (Charlie Reid) is a textbook stroppy teen, although his fondness for childlike imagination games does help distract the traumatised youngest jury members.

Georgia Lowe's design cleverly makes the Donald and Margot Warehouse stage a microcosm of the wider chaos, by suggesting the extra seating banks used in the previous production have collapsed, and using that as the backdrop to the deliberations. King's attempt at a dramatic plot twist does take the story into a soapy place that's at odds with the rest of the tone, but for the most part it's a depressing but consistently powerful 90 minutes that has the distinction of looking beyond the immediately obvious consequences of environmental collapse to the darker sides of the human response to it. 

The Trials by Dawn King is booking until the 27th of August at the Donmar Warehouse.

Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Helen Murray.