Inherit the Wind

Trevor Nunn's inflated productions can sometimes have you reaching for the Deflatine. But 'Inherit the Wind' is no repeat of last year's overblown Deep South extravaganza 'Gone with the Wind'. At the Old Vic, Nunn fills the sails of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E Lee's grand old American vessel with fine revivalist lung-power, great acting spirit and well-prevailing direction.

Lawrence and Lee's courtroom drama was based on the 1925 Scopes monkey trial in which a bible belt teacher was indicted for teaching Darwin. With creationism and faith still very much on the school menu, it's a relevant debate whose terms have evolved. But it's the two grand demagogue roles ñ of wily secular defence lawyer Henry Drummond (based on Clarence Darrow) and prosecutor Matthew Harrison Brady (based on William Jennings Bryan) ñ that are the main attraction here.

Kevin Spacey is unrecognisable as Drummond: white-haired and profanely witty, he slouches across the court with arthritic charisma. He tempts his adversary to destruction when, deprived of an expert witnesses, he calls Brady himself to the stand. David Troughton gives a superbly detailed portrait of three-time presidential reject and religious hero Brady. He captures him as a needy, greedy overgrown child, scoffing finger sandwiches at the ladies' aid buffet despite obvious dyspeptic pain, but also as a ruined populist mountain of a man. Spacey and Troughton convey the essential human sympathy of the rivals ñ which is one common origin they can agree on: when Brady asks his old ally why he has changed, Drummond notes that all motion is relative; Brady has stood still and the world has moved away.

Nunn makes the chorus of local bigots into much more than an ignorant sideshow: he sits the jury in the front row of the audience and, by weaving townsfolk around the action in hymn-singing processions, shows you the beauty and ritual that faith lends this little community, as well as suggesting how quickly a prayer meeting can turn into a lynch mob. The real snake in this erroneous small-town Eden is a cynical newspaper man (the fascinating Mark Dexter), who also brings the hard-boiled poetry of classic American journalism into the rhetorical mix.

Plays have evolved since Lawrence and Lee's day and this one's structure and arguments never quite hit us where we live now. But this is a masterful revival. And Spacey and Troughton's electrifying delivery may make you want to turn the evolutionary clock back to the days when public men spake with passion, wit and reckless honesty.