By Edward Bayliss
Yesterday, I watched the first night of Walkabout Productions’ Room for Doubt. Watched, it seems, is the wrong word. As the UK’s largest immersive student theatre company, Walkabout have for almost three years been delivering interactive performances, wherein the audience play a part in the action. Co-founder of Walkabout Max Shanagher, funnily enough, was a Wayzgoose team member from 2023-2024.
It’s 8:25 and the audience are sitting, standing, waiting – awkwardly – in a peculiar room in St. John’s College. We are told that the jury session will begin soon, but that we are waiting for ‘Patrick.’ Is this part of the show? I suspect so. The cast members (three of which are in the waiting room with us) attempt, painfully, to make small talk, and I don’t know whether to laugh, play along, or bury my nose in my notebook. We learn soon after, that according to the performance, we have just returned from a fifteen minute break and are back on jury duty.
There are six ‘core jurors’ (the cast) and the rest of us form the peripheral jurors; we are all given the chance to vote on three occasions as to the guilt or innocence of the defendant. At its crux, the performance is designed to cradle the euthanasia debate. The accused is a nurse, named but not seen, who has administered an overdose of morphine to her terminally ill patient. The production navigates evidence and testimonies which we, the peripheral jury, are invited to read aloud, and make our own judgement upon. The performance urges us to consider both flaws in the institution of British justice, and the flaws in jurors’ characters, both of which will provoke argument and debate.
The immediacy of our involvement in the performance is mostly very effective. We all sit around a table as jurors might – the boundary between actor and audience is incredibly vague – initially, a fly on the wall observer would not be able to tell the difference. The cast also offer unscripted asides to their neighbours, met admittedly with mixed enthusiasm by last night’s audience, but which afford a greater sense of realism and often, humour.
Room for Doubt’s writer, Raphael Henrion, studies deference, passivity, anger, frustration, and courage in the characters of his play. This pot of personalities boils over more than once. Alliances are formed, factions are established, and it soon becomes less about the case at hand and more about the jurors themselves. Gusts of rage from Mable (Grace Graham) swell as she bites back at her juror nemesis Alex (Noah Benson), both claiming to sit on the right side of justice in their assessment of the seemingly far off defendant, Emily Carter. The production however does not rely solely on loud confrontation and clash. Oli (Daisy Martin) gives convincing breaks as she cools the temperature of the room with her personal story of a terminally ill family member. The gravity of the situation jars bathetically against the ignorance and idiocy of juror Patrick (Matthew Lo), whose judicial laziness works as effective comedic respite. Overseeing the process is the long-suffering head juror Sasha (Orlin Todorov), who cues topics of debate, readings of evidence, and generally buttresses the performance with a sufficient sense of structure.
The show culminates in a final vote. We now realise we are voting on much more than the guilt or innocence of Emily Carter, but rather on the state of justice in general, and on the place of contextual morality within the unbending bounds of the law. Have no objections, this is quite a remarkable dramatic arrangement. So, get the chance to hear the case and cast your vote.
Performances are at 6:00pm and 8:00pm on 10th & 11th June in St. Johns’ Vasey Rooms.