The triumph of Twelve Angry Jurors

If there's one way to judge a dramatic play, it's by the reaction from the audience, writes Brian Byrne. In the first hour of Twelve Angry Jurors in Kilcullen's Town Hall Theatre, one would have heard the proverbial pin drop at any moment of stage silence. The play was written to build and hold suspense, and that was executed to perfection last night.

There were sixteen different people in the jury room, not including the guard. Sixteen different personalities. Twelve of them we could see and hear on the stage. The others were unseen — the victim, the accused, and the two principal witnesses.

That's a lot of personality to manage. At writing, acting, and stage direction levels.

The writing by Reginald Rose back in the mid-50s for the original movie, and later his adaptation for stage, is a masterclass. A dozen people in the claustrophobic confines of a jury room, talking, fretting, arguing, sometimes coming close to blows. All the time building for us the stories of the unseen but key characters. Revealing as they do, the jurors' own stories, their opinions, biases, and insecurities.

It's complicated. It's intense. The play is monumentally challenging for even a professional cast to maintain the pressure-cooker level of angst, suspense, and stripping away of the facades which everyone builds around themselves.

At last night's performance by the Drama Dynamics Drama Group, we all saw that the future of Kilcullen's proud history in amateur drama is in excellent hands. The DDDG is wonderfully complementary to the Kilcullen Drama Group and the Kilcullen Junior Drama Group, not to mention the outstanding work of pupils in both Scoil Bhride and CPC. But the standing ovation which the cast and production team of Twelve Angry Jurors received at the end of the show had been absolutely earned.

It wasn't just the acting out of the diverse characters which can inhabit any real jury room. It wasn't only that they had learned their lines and their individual personas so well. It was also the stage-craft that kept movement going on a potentially most static set of a large table and twelve chairs. It was how they each retreated into their own space when the action shifted elsewhere, but still demonstrated their ongoing soul-searching. It was, in short, an extraordinarily three-dimensional presentation which had everyone else in the theatre sweating it out with them in that jury room.

There is no way that I would single out any individual performance, because every one was its own inspiration to anyone interested in getting on the stage themselves. Producer and director Evelyn O'Sullivan noted that the foundation of the group was the adult class started in Drama Dynamics a few years ago, and that it was the class's annual performances which continued to attract more members.

But we'll not let Evelyn get away that lightly. As she rightly pointed out, there are the actors, and there are the audiences without whom there is no point in acting. But — and Evelyn being the person she is, she didn't mention this — there's also the vision and skill that's necessary to bring all the elements of a play together to become a living thing on the stage and in the minds of those who come to see it.

So the presentation of a bouquet to the director by Ray Kelly, one of the early Drama Dynamics adult students, was just a small token of appreciation for her work. From the cast, and from all of us in the audience. For giving us another tour de force.

All the Diary's pictures from the play are here.

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