Inadmissable Evidence

Fashionable Londoners go to the Donmar Warehouse to engage in shut-eye chic. It’s a weird way to relax. You buy a ticket to John Osborne’s 1964 classic, Inadmissable Evidence, and you sleep through most of its two and a half hours. All around me were seats full of happy dozers. How I envied them. Mind you, I felt bad for the cast because the snoozers were nodding and drooling in full view of the stage. Entertaining the unconscious isn’t what thesps go into showbiz for. Still, they’d read the script so they knew the scale of their enemy.

Osborne’s bright idea was to create a self-loathing misanthropist and to watch his world collapse around him. He made the central character a lawyer (named ‘Bill’, significantly) as an act of vengeance against the divorce specialists who had purloined large chunks of his fortune. So Bill is a solicitor in a crummy practice somewhere off Fleet Street.