KIRSTY WARK:
Does this play, at a particular time and a particularly dangerous time, still work in 2003?

JAMES BROWN:
It doesn't work, for me it didn't work in a political sense, it was just a comedy, it was like policemen behaving badly.

Rhys Ifans is an amazing star, you feel like you are watching Peter Sellers or Alec Guinness, but they did it on screen. He is a brilliant mimic and the rest of the cast was good.

By the time we got to the start of the third hour, it was gone for me. I was being entertained, but it wasn't so much a message as a mess.

KIRSTY WARK:
At the beginning, we were treated to a soundscape of Tony Blair and Mrs Thatcher, which gives you the idea he has updated the play by dint of references rather than any political undertow.

Did that help?

NATASHA WALTER:
It's unfair to say it was just references. There was a point at the end where he gathered up political impact.

The play cannot have the impact it had when it was written, when the scandal it was referring to had actually happened, but when the maniac talks about the way scandal operates in our society, he has got this great line:

"Scandal is the fertiliser of social democracy"

You know what he's getting at, we are in scandal-obsessed times and we focus on scandal, the detail rather than the bigger structure.

Those things work well still, still have relevance, but, as a whole, the play does not have the political impact it could have.

At the end, I was wondering why Simon Nye didn't use it as inspiration for his own play, a different play, the scandal now, say the death of a black person in custody or treatment of refugees, something that would grip but using the same devices.

KIRSTY WARK:
Rhys Ifans has had to carry so much. He said, after six years in film, he wanted to give himself a creative boot up the backside.

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
He really did.

You come away thinking you have watched a one-man show. The policeman all merge into one thing.

I agree with Natasha, I wish they had the balls to change the thing. There is nothing shocking knowing policemen are corrupt, you know they push the bloke out of the window and they are trying to cover it up.

Ifans is the only thing that keeps it going, because it is too long.

There are clever lines, but I felt at the end, the portrayal of the female journalist, who arrives as a clich� out of nowhere, she comes tottering in on five-inch pink high heels, with a skirt split up the side, puts her legs on the desk, is completely unsympathetic.

KIRSTY WARK:
In the translation of the Fo original script, there is nothing to direct how the journalist should be, but Simon Nye has her ...

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
He has changed everybody else and brought them up to date.

KIRSTY WARK:
She didn't get good lines.

NATASHA WALKER:
You felt as though she was a reporter from a totally different play. I didn't find this play dragged as much as you did. I felt the pace was there.

It worked because it melded different kinds of comedy, the comedy of embarrassment of one of the policemen and the mad farce and slapstick. There was a fantastic moment when he got the policemen to join in the protest song.

JAMES BROWN:
That was terrible. I felt, I was impressed and entertained endlessly by Rhys Ifans until that point when they started singing Public Enemy songs.

Then there was a whole list of references of Pop Idol and tube train problems, and I was waiting for the reference to congestion charge. That doesn't mean anything to anyone outside London. Neither does the tube. It was like a bad cover version with a brilliant star in the middle of it.

NATASHA WALKER:
The style was brilliant.

KIRSTY WARK:
At the beginning I thought Rhys Ifans set off like a train and it was like a sitcom, but when he settled into the judge in scene 2 of Act 1, he brought a huge amount of power to the part.

NATASHA WALKER:
I thought so too. There still is some impact there. I thought he did it brilliantly.

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
He becomes a serious actor when he becomes the judge. The rest of the time he's being a jokester.