Inadmissable Evidence

Fashionable Londoners go to the Donmar Warehouse to engage in shut-eye chic. It’s a weird way to relax. You buy a ticket to John Osborne’s 1964 classic, Inadmissable Evidence, and you sleep through most of its two and a half hours. All around me were seats full of happy dozers. How I envied them. Mind you, I felt bad for the cast because the snoozers were nodding and drooling in full view of the stage. Entertaining the unconscious isn’t what thesps go into showbiz for. Still, they’d read the script so they knew the scale of their enemy.

Osborne’s bright idea was to create a self-loathing misanthropist and to watch his world collapse around him. He made the central character a lawyer (named ‘Bill’, significantly) as an act of vengeance against the divorce specialists who had purloined large chunks of his fortune. So Bill is a solicitor in a crummy practice somewhere off Fleet Street. Oddly enough, he tells us, ‘the law is there to be exploited just like it exploits us’. Er, hang on. I’m lost already. Solicitors feeling exploited by the law? That’s as likely as astronauts feeling exploited by space travel.

Anyway, the law isn’t Osborne’s main target here. It’s sex. And in particular the terrible things sex does to poor old men. Bill can’t stand women. But he needs them, too, so he’s always chasing skirt. And although he’s a fat, sour, bald, whiney, humourless, middle-aged misery-guts, he’s also a sex champion. He’s got four women on the go. His long-suffering wife, two gorgeous secretaries and a sophisticated 40-year-old beauty who loves him unconditionally and finds it amusing that he plays around in the typing pool. I mean honestly. It’s impossible to believe a single syllable of this vain, empty, shapeless, diseased, hectoring twaddle.