Writer and Director: Jamie Armitage
The police interview is in all sorts of ways the basis for drama – two people facing off, a battle of wits, a clash of personalities, the highest stakes imaginable. It could be Antigone facing Creon across a battered Formica table, drama stripped to its essentials. Jamie Armitage directs his own version of this set-up in An Interrogation, downstairs at the Hampstead Theatre.
Rosie Sheehy is the interrogating police officer, and Jamie Ballard is the plausible, cocksure defendant. We meet Rosie’s character Ruth being soft-soaped by her boss, being put in a bad situation, and having coffee spilt on her shirt. Ruth is us, we want Ruth to win: we probably don’t care much for civil liberties or the rights of the defendant even before we meet the suspect Cameron, played by Jamie Ballard with exquisitely manifested smugness and arrogance, making him the one we want to lose straight out of the gate.
This is only slightly to challenge the premise, but it does alter the stakes. The audience isn’t wondering whether Cameron is innocent or guilty, it is wondering whether the police interrogator can get a confession before the clock runs out on the investigation. It puts the focus on strategy and strength of personality much more than on guilt or innocence. And that is a gift for two high-powered actors, playing every piercing glance, every uncertain pause, every misspoken statement, to maximum effect.
The intensity of the face-off is enhanced by the use of a number of cameras posted round the set, some giving a bird’s eye view of the room, some displaying facial expressions on an upstage screen, some focussed on tell-tale physical reactions the two antagonists display secretly. We can see what their hands are doing under the table. It is a very effective, very telling, very simple device, but it does raise a larger question: shouldn’t this be on a television screen rather than a stage?
The two actors (and Colm Gormley in a walk-on role as Ruth’s creepy boss, generating waves of distrust with minimal stage time, so plaudits for Colm) use the barest minimum of stagecraft: eye flicks, withheld contact, tiny pauses. It is acting craft that works magnificently in camera close-up; it is just about perceptible in an auditorium as small as the Hampstead Theatre’s studio, but it would be practically invisible in the cheap seats at the Old Vic.
It is possible Jamie Armitage conceived the piece as a play for television but got picked up by the small theatre world of Edinburgh Fringe and off-West End studios, and it is a privilege to watch a fine cast being so effective and so subtle, but a theatre piece having recourse to that much video support does feel slightly misplaced. That said, it is powerful writing, powerful playing, and an effective hour of stage time.
Runs until 22 February 2025
