The Jury Experience at Aberdeen Music Hall

It’s official. Our mobile phones have won – and our waning attention spans are reflected in every part of modern life, including our theatre.

TV shows are now made so that characters explain what is happening on the screen for the benefit of people double screening, and plays have got much shorter – including this one, The Jury Experience.

A regular visitor to Aberdeen, this touring show usually rocks up every few months bringing a different crime mystery each time.

The idea is simple: The audience is the jury and must vote on whether they think the person up on stage did what they are accused of, according to the evidence laid out in the ‘courtroom’.

Hour-long shows are in fashion

Running time is around hour, which is quite short when you consider tickets are priced between £28 and £38 – more than 50p a minute. But it is the fashion.

The Lemon Tree has long been running its excellent A Play, Pie and A Pint series, whose shows last roughly an hour.

And we only have to look at the Hydro in Glasgow last week, where Lily Allen played a sold-out show for an hour to more than 10,000 fans – something unthinkable only years ago.

But even though some might be cynical about our dwindling attention spans, I’m all for it.

This Jury Experience performance of Diamonds, Lies & A Dead Man was a 6pm showing on a Friday. And there was another at 8pm.

You can either go from work and be home in time for Love Island or catch the late showing and be out just in time to join the pre-match build up for Scotland v Morocco (…let’s not talk about the result).

The show itself is pretty good too.

Is the driver a mastermind criminal?

It’s a straightforward premise: A chauffeur is accused of stealing a priceless necklace from his former employer, global superstar Lana Tonneti. He denies it – but various exhibits and witnesses put him in the frame.

If the audience believes he is guilty, they raise the green side of the paddle provided, or if not, they show the red side of the paddle.

The production is put together well. The crew uses dramatic music in just the right places, and the cast have to perfectly time their monologues in time with the backing track’s dramatic crescendo.

I’d love to be able to name cast members I liked – but sadly the promoters were unable to provide me with a cast list.

Anyway, the judge for Friday night’s early show combined comedy with a command of the room, ensuring the audience/jury was kept in check and didn’t deliberate for too long.

There were two really understated – but funny – touches at this show, as two audience members played cameos, one reading from a script as an ‘expert witness’ and the other being the jury foreperson.

Both were brilliant – hats off to them for being brave.

Attention to detail is lacking

But – and here is the boring, roll-your-eyes part.

As a member of the Press and Journal’s court and crime time, I spend a fair bit of time in actual courts, so I was bound to be keeping a mental note of inaccuracies.

Firstly, the script is distinctively English. Many terms used are foreign to Scottish courts and I felt the script could have easily been amended to include terminology we’re used to.

And secondly, there were things that simply do not happen in court. Like a bad-character application being done in front of the jury.

Okay, okay, I’ll put my clipboard down and take my work hat off.

I know I’m being pedantic and that there has to be room for artistic licence, but this is a busman’s holiday of sorts, so forgive me.

Can you divorce your emotions from the facts?

What I loved about this show was that it does embrace the very point we face every day: Teaching people the ability to remove the emotion from the evidence.

Yes, the accused might be a foul-mouthed, insolent so and so – but do the facts prove his guilt? That’s ultimately all a jury must decide.

My favourite part is the cast encourage the audience to chat – even with strangers (perhaps we will defy our mobile phone obsessions after all) and it was nice to talk to a group of theatregoers about what they thought about the suspect.

Just like court, once the verdict is in, the jury does not get to find out what actually happened.

You’re left thinking – did you do the right thing? Was your decision sound?

A highly entertaining hour and an interesting concept.

Is it worth the money? Well, when The Jury Experience returns to Aberdeen – I’ll let you be the judge.

[Source: (Dale Haslam) - Press and Journal]