The Fear of 13 review: Adrien Brody’s Death Row play is too afraid to let the dark in

It’s hard to imagine the person who wouldn’t be captivated by gripping prison drama The Fear of 13. Much like lethally spicy dishes in curry houses, some theatre shows should come with warnings to the unadventurous: little chilli symbols to mark out peppery Renaissance wordplay or palm-moistening audience participation. But American playwright Lindsey Ferrentino’s clear storytelling slips down effortlessly as she exposes the true story of Nick Yarris, trapped on death row in Pennsylvania for 22 years for a murder he didn’t commit.

Hollywood actor Adrien Brody (The Pianist, Succession) is doing time in the intimate confines of the Donmar as this suffering prisoner, giving a powerful performance that doesn’t let this wronged man feel like a straightforward victim. He’s intriguingly lithe and strange, hard to read – a recovered meth addict who binged his way through 1,000 books in the prison library, assailing his increasingly charmed prison visitor Jackie (Nana Mensah) with literary references and flirty comments rather than protestations of his innocence. Jackie falls for him, but their romance is stifled by the endless wait for the DNA evidence that could set him free, bungled by an apathetic attorney and a shambolic legal system.

Director Justin Martin’s production sits us right in the middle of the prison that’s tried and failed to break Nick’s spirit. In Miriam Buether’s design, guards march up and down a tiled runway through the audience, stark under fluorescent light; security screens are ready to capture anyone who attempts to make a prison break (this performance is very much not the place to attempt a mid-show trip to the loo). The Pennsylvania prison system was founded by Quakers so there’s a rule of silence, we’re told. Accordingly, this production plays, a little, with sound and its absence. In the deep muffled quiet, Nick tells us of the noises that fill his brain – the remembered tears of his mother at his trial. At moments of high emotional intensity, the assembled prisoners break into forbidden harmonies, turning a soul song into a eulogy for two convict lovers parted by force.

Often, this play feels like an exercise in making horrors into something beautiful – or, to put it less positively, like a work that rubs the roughest edges off a murderous prison system, smoothing them with humour and sentimentality. Last month, Marcellus Williams was executed on death row on weak evidence, after a trial that excluded Black jurors – the international outcry that followed exposed the racism of a criminal justice system that falls down hardest on the voiceless, discriminated against, and mentally ill. Ferrentino’s narrative effectively shows a wrongfully accused man trapped by a corrupt legal system primed to find the accused guilty, without really gesturing to the wider cruelties at work here – or letting moral ambiguity creep in.

Instead, the profound bleakness underlying this story is constantly kept at bay with jokes, soul singing, and the bustling of guards and prisoners coming and going on its busy stage. It’s engrossing and poignant, even if it’s afraid to let the dark in.