‘You can’t handle the truth!’ — the greatest courtroom dramas of all time

Our legal system is pure theatre and always has been. Many barristers stand accused of being failed actors and vice versa. Judges love the dressing-up box and a chance to give their gavel a good bang. With murmuring galleries, shocking verdicts, swooning witnesses, cries of ‘all rise’ and ‘take him down’, the flummery and drama of the courtroom has always supplied a rich genre for film, theatre and telly. Now there’s a chance to see one of the more serious courtroom classics in the West End.

Twelve Angry Men — originally written for the screen and directed by Sidney Lumet — is about a grumpy New York jury deciding on the fate of an ethnic kid accused of stabbing his father. If guilty, it’s the electric chair. There’s racism in the air as 12 men sweat it out in a heatwave, keen to get their verdict returned and to go home. But for one juror it would be a unanimous guilty vote.

‘Life is in their hands but death is on their minds!’ says the original film poster. But this sharp, pre-civil rights drama also comes with a nice howdunnit, Agatha Christie streak as the jurors are forced properly to sift the evidence. In this new stage version you’ll see the film star Jeff Fahey, Martin Shaw as the awkward juror, as well as the great Robert Vaughn (Napoleon Solo from The Man From U.N.C.L.E.) playing the sharp-eyed oldster.

What are the other enjoyable landmarks of the trial genre? I have omitted several classics — The Crucible and To Kill a Mockingbird, for example — as they now reek too much of the school syllabus. Here is my selection of fully legal entertainments, probably best viewed while crunching your way through a box of Maltesers.