These smug legal eagles are guilty as charged

RAPE is one of the most fraught issues of our day. The question of how to balance the rights of victims to seek justice with the rights of the accused to defend themselves is hotly contested.

Nina Raine’s often brilliant new play looks as if it’s going to take all that on, but after a blisteringly cynical first half it turns out to be just another vexed relationship drama.

It all starts promisingly, with anna Maxwell Martin and Ben Chaplin (fresh from TV’s apple Tree Yard) leading a group of well-heeled barrister couples joking about ‘doing’ the crimes for which their clients are being tried. To make it even more uncomfortable, Maxwell Martin’s character, who’s just given birth, cradles a real-life baby ( the author’s infant daughter) on stage.

In this long, gripping first half, Raine shows herself to be a gifted writer of lacerating dialogue.

Though explicit locker-room banter abounds, the story takes a darker twist with the fate of a working- class woman in a rape trial on which Chaplin and his wife’s friend are acting as defence and prosecution counsels.

What for them is a day job, concluded with drinks, joints and jousting, is a harrowing reality for the victim, though Raine is careful to make her a tough cookie.

The play is steeped in the ways of the Bar, and Raine deploys her research with panache.

Rehearsing court appearances and thrashing out their own infidelities in legalese, it is distasteful, witty, informative, gripping, thoroughly recognisable and decidedly ugly.

Underpinning it all is an unpalatable truth: people ‘ don’t listen to arguments, they just decide’. Justice is primitive stuff.

Where it goes wrong for me is the second half. Roger Michell’s slick production confines itself to over-familiar aga- saga territory and plays it safe on Hildegard Bechtler’s set, which looks like a Habitat lighting department.

Most enjoyable, but outrageous, are adam James as the boorish pal who takes a moral stand and Daisy Haggard, as the actress friend. But after being primed by the sharp repartee of the first half, I wanted more home truths from the impressive Heather Craney as the woman they neglect.

DODIE SMITH is best known for writing 101 Dalmatians, but her coming of age novel, I Capture The Castle, is a delightfully rambling bohemian rhapsody of country life of the Thirties.

It’s a fond and episodic yarn that’s been turned into a wholesome, but thoroughly agreeable, new musical by Teresa Howard and Steven edis.

WITH more than a touch of pride and prejudice, it follows the eccentric Mortmain family, whose lives in a tumbledown castle are touched by the arrival of rich americans.

The story is told by teenage aspiring writer Cassie as she sketches her dotty writer father, her back-to-nature stepmother and her man-hungry sister Rose, who falls, eagerly, for one of the handsome Yanks.

Steven edis’s music is a homegrown mix of styles played on keyboards, percussion and violin and I came out humming the title tune. Brigid Larmour’s hearty production is distilled by Ti Green’s set, the castle suggested by twin towers of bric-a-brac and a wraparound wooden staircase.

With references to rustic pagan rites, in a story that runs from solstice to solstice, it’s a warm, bucolic tribute to Smith’s novel.

Kate Batter is cheerfully lightheaded as big sister Rose, while Suzanne ahmet is amusingly histrionic as the let-it-all-hang-out stepmother.

Julia St John adds style and swagger as the american heiress with a dapper son.

I couldn’t for the life of me see why anyone would get hung up on this unprepossessing youth, but then the men in the story are just fantasies for the ladies: swains, swells and screwballs.

at the end of the day, the twoand- a- half hour show is held together by the delightful Lowri Izzard as our heroine Cassie. She embodies her character’s yearning with a strawberry voice that’s sweet, lush and a tiny bit tart.

This is a big-hearted night out that more than captures the soul of Smith’s beloved castle.

After Watford, I Capture the Castle will move to the Octagon theatre, Bolton (April 26 to May 6) and the Oxford Playhouse (May 16 to 20).