Adrien Brody hasn’t performed on stage since he hit the big time with his Oscar-winning turn in The Pianist back in 2003. So it’s unexpected but very cool that he’s popped up as the star attraction in the first play in Timothy Sheader’s first season in charge of the small but hard-hitting Donmar Warehouse. The Fear of 13 is US playwright Lindsay Ferrentino’s stage version of a 2015 documentary by British filmmaker David Singleton, which tells the story of Nick Yarris, a Pennsylvania man who spent 22 years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit.
What you’re hearing is a number of warning bells about excessively worthy celebrity projects: screen star who isn't really a stage actor; inspiring true story; adaptation of non-theatrical source material – shows like this sometimes pop up and feel stiff and clunky. Projects rather than plays.
But Ferrentino is a proper playwright, Justin Martin – who did the honours for Jodie Comer smash Prima Facie – is a proper stage director and, yes, Brody proves himself to be a proper stage actor.
Where the documentary was effectively a monologue performed by the real Yarris, the stage version eschews one-man-play cliches and puts Brody’s incorrigible protagonist at the heart of a mostly male ensemble who take on the role of various wardens, cops, prisoners and miscellaneous others. And they sing, too! If the play always feels slightly tied to the documentary format, there’s enough raw theatricality to Martin’s staging to overcome this, with the actors intermingling with the front rows of the audience, and the hard bitten, tough-as-nail looking men frequently bursting into disarming snatches of soothing gospel music.
There is one female character: Jackie Schaffer (Nana Mensah), a PhD student who visits the death row Yarris is incarcerated in on behalf of a human rights charity (it is suggested at the end that she is a fictionalised version of a real character, details changed to protect her identity). She soon tires of the other men, but is charmed by the eccentric Yarris, an inveterate storyteller and devourer of books whose nickname is ‘Houdini’ after he went on the lam for a month early in his incarceration.
Rather than tell her – and by extension, us – why he’s on death row straight up, Brody’s goofily charismatic Yarris spins a series of witty, shaggy dog-esque accounts that gradually fill in his past. It’s some considerable time into the play before he casually drops his big bombshell: he’s innocent.
This is something he has ceased to see as relevant to his situation until he hears about the advent of DNA testing and sees the opportunity to finally clear his name with the help of the earnest young Jackie, who has, by-the-by, 100 percent fallen for him. Thus begins the play’s agonising second act, which details Yarris’s nightmarish journey towards freedom, a process marked by a glacial pace and almost unbelievable series of cock ups.
Is there a message in all this? There are some shocking moments, most especially Yarris’s original trial, in which he is sentenced to death on, basically, vibes: the widower of a murder victim emotionally accuses him of being her killer in court and the jury goes along with it, despite there being zero evidence. The colossal, soul-crushing wait to get the DNA test can partly be attributed to the newness of the technology, but it’s to do with how death row inmates are simply filed away to the darkest corners of a virtually unworkable bureaucratic machine. Still, it stops short of calling for the abolition of the death penalty or the root and branch reform of the US prison system.
It’s not Hamlet, it’s not an Olivier-attempt showcase for Brody’s range. But neither is it sitting down to swallow your preachy medicine. It’s a beautifully theatrical production and a charismatic turn from Brody who portrays Yarris as both utterly charming and at least plausibly dangerous. His performance is charged with an impulsive recklessness and blindness to consequences that suggests how he got into such a disastrous mess. It is, above all, a cracking piece of storytelling, that exists because Yarris is a fascinating man who has lived a remarkable life, and because Brody has the tortured oddball charisma to bring that to the stage.