The Trial....Quite Bloody Literally

Steven Berkoff’s adaptation of The Trial is something I really enjoyed working on in my second year of uni as we did a show with 52 actors, 12 directors and about 20 designers and it is something I will never forget working on so when I saw that The Trial was going to be on at our venue in Edinburgh I was so excited to go and see it, it was at midnight as well which made it a slightly drunken affair at that.

Well….it BLOODY WELL WASN’T THE TRIAL!! Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING about it was wrong to the point where I nearly walked out 20 minutes into the show.

1.      The set was just a white box….we were in a cave for crying out loud, there is SO much they could have done with the setting but instead they put white paper all over the walls and floor. Idiots.

2.      They were multi role playing….BADLY! All of their characters sounded the same and it annoyed me to NO end that the only person who was American was the main character and the others were all cockney English, it made no sense what so ever.

3.      They completely changed one of the sexiest characters in the entire show into an old washer woman so goodness only knows what the heck they were trying to do there.

4.      Don’t even get me started on the costumes or I will rant for an eternity…..

5.      Half the cast looked like they had forgotten their lines the entire way through

6.      The Trial is very wordy….SO THEY CHANGED THE SCRIPT

7.      There was absolutely no enthusiasm on the directing front, I don’t even know where they were going with it but there was no movement the whole way through, it was stand up, sit down, try and do things in sync and fail miserably.

And to make it even worse I had dragged two of the actors from our little team of awesomeness along to see what I thought was a brilliant show, for them to walk out going “ummmm….what in god’s name was that supposed to be about?” Safe to say when we went postering at 1am I was stomping up and down that mile getting out my frustration at an hour wasted. Where is the silver lining to this story…..? On the stage of The Trial, where the border of the stage.... was silver.