Seeing the light | 24 January 2013

Meet Fenton. He’s a psycho. A year or so back he was banged up for murdering a preppy teenage girl in one of America’s less-enlightened southern states. Enter a campaigning congressman, John Daniels, who hopes to teach Fenton to read and write and to help him make something of his ruined life. The opening of Richard Vergette’s play is intriguing enough but a savage twist is on its way.

Fenton rejects all the congressman’s overtures. Asked to recite the alphabet, he glares and grunts and spits out monosyllabic expletives. The only expressive medium for which he shows any talent is the flinging of furniture at high speed across the interrogation room. These chair-chucking episodes are interrupted by a Jesus-freak warder, who likes to barge in and use Fenton’s head for drum practice with his nightstick.

Congressman Daniels finally reaches the nub of Fenton’s problem: short sight. A bright but rebellious kid, he was banished to the rear of class at school and his poor vision wrecked his chances of learning. This breakthrough enables Daniels to tame his quarry and to persuade him to take up reading. Now the twist. The victim of Fenton’s crime was Daniels’s only daughter. This tense and fascinating set-up develops into a thrilling psychological chess match. Daniels succeeds in nurturing Fenton’s love of literature and we scroll forward a couple of months and discover the pair, like an old married couple, swapping choice paragraphs from favourite novels.

Daniels then gets Fenton to act as spokesman for his prison-reform campaign, and when the programme becomes successful, Daniels lands an important Washington job. Fenton realises he’s been had. Daniels has used him as a pawn in his long-term plan to capture the presidency. Several more moves complicate this absorbing play and it ends with the true identity of the murderer left tantalisingly unclear.