Writer: Chloë Moss
Director: Felix Barrett
The people who answer 999 calls and coordinate emergency responses are supposed to be perpetually calm and unflappable, providing a sense of order to what can be the most chaotic of situations. That is not a description one would apply to Joe, Russell Tovey’s operator, in Chloë Moss’s tense thriller.
Based on the screenplay for the Danish 2018 film Den Skyldige by Gustav Moller and Emil Nygaard Albertsen – which was also adapted into a 2021 English-language film starring Jake Gyllenhaal – The Guilty sees Joe on what is supposed to be his last shift at this desk job. There is a cloud hanging over him – a tribunal is scheduled for the next day, to do with whatever took him off frontline duties. As Joe deals with calls from a nosey journalist, a testy relationship with the wife from whom he’s separated, and a colleague on whom he is exerting pressure to testify in his favour, there are hints that Joe is not exactly an exemplary copper.
He’s certainly not cut out for phone response. Whether it’s reacting to a woman who’s called 999 because a neighbour’s party is too loud or a man who reports a mugging by a prostitute, Joe brings his own value judgments to calls in ways which are both amusing for us as an audience and unprofessional from a police perspective.
But it’s that sense of not doing things by the book that drives the main plot of this taut hour. When Joe receives a call from Emily, a woman in obvious distress who seems to be being abducted by her ex-husband, leaving their two young children alone at home, Tovey excels in bringing both Joe’s professionalism and his compassion to the fore. There is frustration, too, at only ever hearing snippets of the response units being called out. Tovey paces Alex Eales’s set like a tiger caged by technology, a man who feels impotent at being denied his frontline role.
As Joe uses various techniques – not all of them legal – to try and find more information that can help Emily and her children, one gets a sense of a character that, while morally compromised, has a strong sense of duty and compassion within. Every action leads to a gradual unfolding of the story – but as the layers fall away, it becomes clear that the audio Joe listens to on the line is not revealing the full horror of the case.
Director Felix Barrett helps maintain the pace and tension, keeping the audience on the edge of their seats as the race to find Emily intensifies. Gareth Fry’s sound design is also of great assistance, helping us understand the cacophony of different calls and channels that Joe has to monitor, revealing some heinous crimes in audio alone.
The one downside comes from the contrivance – admittedly necessary for the stage play to work – of Joe working completely alone in the control room. There is a sense that if he were surrounded by other despatch workers, some of the decisions that drive the production’s narrative would not occur.
There is also a sense that Joe’s eventual confession about what he did to warrant a tribunal comes across as a little too pat. In a production in which Tovey is able to swing from concerned parent to professional policeman to angry husband and around again, the revelation feels like the flattest, least real part of his tremendous performance.
Those minor points aside, The Guilty is an hour of nail-biting drama that encourages its audience to lean in, and then retains them in a vice-like grip. On-stage thrillers rarely come as tense, or as rewarding, as this.
Runs until 18 August 2026
