REVIEW: Strong ending rescues The Inquiry after overly-dense opening hour in the Minerva

There are excellent performances, plus an intriguing premise and a powerful final confrontation. But it’s difficult to walk away from The Inquiry thinking that this should be left as the final version.

By the end, the debut play by Harry Davies, a writer and an investigative reporter for The Guardian, has compellingly and very persuasively argued that public life isn’t remotely about what’s right and wrong; depressingly it’s all about who knows what about whom. But the first half of the evening is overly dense and slightly frustrating as various combinations of people hold knowing conversations which are deliberately obscure to us. You struggle to cling on to what is supposed to be happening – which is possibly the whole point. But the result is an opening hour which lacks tension and certainly lacks spark.

This is a demanding play which demands patience and concentration – and ultimately it rewards them both with an ending which more or less redeems the hard work getting there. Even so, editing, reordering and a much greater sense of just what’s at stake would benefit the first half hugely. Which is to take nothing away from the performances – especially Malcolm Sinclair as the odious Lord Patrick Thorncliffe, a behind-the-scenes wheeler-dealer intent on managing everything, absolutely convinced – and he’s proved right – that knowledge is power.

Excellent too from Deborah Findlay as Lady Justice Deborah Wingate, the judge whose public inquiry is about to publish its findings into a water contamination scandal which happened on the watch of rising star MP Arthur Gill (John Heffernan), currently Lord Chancellor and tipped as the next Prime Minister. It’s clearly in Gill’s interests that certain things don’t emerge; Lord Patrick Thorncliffe is there to provide the ammunition which will ensure that they don’t. The tension in a vastly superior second half is whether Gill will stoop that low. Something emerges from Lady Justice Deborah Wingate’s past; will Gill use it to silence her?

It all hangs on a scandal in which tens of thousands of people were buried far too close to an aquifer into which their decomposing remains duly leaked. It’s odd that playwright Harry Davies isn’t even remotely interested in telling us what happened, except that Gill was an environment minister at the time. It seems a bit of a hole in the plot. But Davies’ focus is solely on the political fall-out. And that fall-out falls out in a superb final scene in which finally Wingate and Gill meet, the judiciary finally face to face with the politician whose pressing interest is to thwart it. The scene is brilliantly played and substantially turns round a play which starts rather sluggishly.

Heffernan is excellent as the threatened MP, arrogant, vain, and occasionally playful but with a ghastly sense of entitlement and expectation, all part of his driving ambition. The final scene shows a different side to him as the mystery of the portraits – in perhaps rather too large a coincidence – is finally revealed. There is strong support from Nicholas Rowe as the lead barrister in the inquiry, navigating a world where politics clearly doesn’t have justice on its agenda.

​