In two senses, this debut play by Harry Davies has a lot going on offstage. Previews were extended to allow the show, according to a theatre statement, “to reach its full potential”. And in writing about a public inquiry into a contaminated water scandal, Davies clearly alludes to the poisoned spa baths in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, but also follows the Norwegian’s practice of crucial events having occurred before the action. The Inquiry, though, stretches the technique by starting after both the scandal and the public hearings are over.
The play’s 100 minutes focus on the process of “Maxwellisation” that allows witnesses to challenge and redact criticisms before a report’s publication. Justice minister Arthur Gill (John Heffernan) hopes to steer inquiry chair Lady Justice Wingate (Deborah Findlay) away from conclusions that might stymie his prime ministerial ambitions, which are also threatened by the interest of newspaper profile-writer Elyse (Shazia Nicholls) in his well-guarded past.
Perhaps surprisingly for a dramatist whose day job is investigative reporting for the Guardian, the play feels vague about current media ethics. Characters are traumatised by the potential publication of personal details that seem decisively outside the definition of “public interest” in the 2012 Leveson report on media standards. At one point, Gill explains that he protected his private life because things were very different when he entered politics – but, in the chronology, that would be circa 2003, when gay frontbenchers didn’t frighten the Whitehall horses.
The Inquiry is a sort of thriller – with Malcolm Sinclair as a corrupt political fixer channelling Ian Richardson in the original BBC House of Cards – but Davies breaks the Agatha Christie rule that the audience must be clearly shown clues to the solution, even as they are misdirected about their import. Here, a climactic revelation not only falls from nowhere but depends on an eye-popping coincidence.
The fine actors bring energy and engagement. Findlay suggests the psychological consequences of a life of being “judgey”. Heffernan’s slight pause before “So help me God” when taking an oath hints at intriguing spiritual and judicial depths that the play does not explore. A minor character is revealed in passing to have made a major decision, but that is also never followed up, adding to the sense of several stronger dramas happening somewhere else. The next challenge for this debut dramatist is to move them centre stage.
