Seventy minutes of thrilling police procedural expertly performed by a cast of three examining the
guilty façade of the everyman. Criminals- they look just like you and me
An Interrogation is the debut play by Jamie Armitage, exploring answers to the question: “Do I look like a criminal?”
A three-handed play set in the tension of a police interview room. It explores a capable young woman, DC Ruth Palmer (played by Rosie Sheehy) who fights to prove her gut instinct against two older men. Her supervisor John Culin (played by Colm Gormley), and the man she suspects of committing atrocious crimes against two women, Cameron Andrews (played by Jamie Ballard).
I found the play to be gripping from the start. It was well-paced, thematically relevant and provocative. I enjoyed the cat and mouse dance of power play, intrigue and side-eye.
Sarah Mercadé and Jonathan Chan’s design lends itself well to the atmosphere. It genuinely felt representative of the monolith of modern workplace interior design- sad carpet, strip lighting and mish-mash awkward furniture. The mood created though is at once intimate. Clever sound design by Tom Foskett-Barnes enables the audience to feel immersed, with police station soundscapes of phones ringing, people chattering, and the underlying bass-baritone sound effects creating a sense of unease and anxiety once the door of the room closes. The overall effect is that the black box space of the Hampstead Theatre feels site-sympathetic. The audience forms part of the action as if they are police colleagues sat on the other side of a one-way mirror: part of the drama, but with voyeuristic separation.
The production is unsubtle in its depiction of casual sexism. It felt like we were being spoon-fed the moral of the story. Though sold as realistic, elements of the show were simply not believable. I’ve seen enough 24 Hours in Police Custody to know police interview rooms are laden with panic strips, and have enough feminine wits to know when to leave a situation. Nevertheless, the accessibility of the dialogue allowed the performers to convey the complexity and depth of their characters.
Sheehy shines through as the protagonist. She is thoroughly convincing as a modern feminist investigator, weaving the mental gymnastics her character has to pull to carry off a sensational bait and switch against the men who constantly gaslight her. She felt relatable.
Gormley takes a more restrained approach to his jovial but patronizing old sweat guv’nor role, with his character’s charming sheen only being removed at the very end of the play. I enjoyed his comic timing.
Ballard plays the controlling antagonist with ease, spitting monologues about the audacity of a millennial, paired with intense, dominating stares. He too is compelling as a character you’ve probably met in your own life. His detailed expressiveness works particularly well as part of Dan Light’s live-feed projections on the back wall of the stage. We see powerful close-ups of characters at key points, intertwined with dramatic irony with the audience seeing what gestures are being carried out under the table. A current theatrical trend, the live-feed projections work for the most part here, enhancing the static set with a sense of dynamism and urgency.
Ultimately, although I worked out the plot twist from the start, this took nothing away from the clever portrayals of characters seeking control of a situation each of them felt they were entitled to possess. You are reminded several times about the complicity of society in ignoring the inconvenient. As DC Palmer says: “people like you always get away with it”. Indeed they do. Armitage wants the audience to know that we need more DC Palmers in the world so that indeed they don’t.
Author: Francesca Balchin