First off Constant Reader... what a shite week I have had. That twunt with the voodoo doll and the Acme box of pins has been having a field day at my expense. Strangely what seemed to kick it off was actually the highpoint of the week, namely seeing THE EXONERATED at Riverside Studios with Owen.
The play has been acclaimed in it's off-Broadway and Edinburgh stagings and I can see why. Ten actors seated in a line behind lecterns take turns telling the stories of six real-life cases of innocent people being condemned to death in the US and spending years on Death Row until they were exonerated of all charges and released. more or often than not, to a world that still viewed them with suspicion. The text was based soley on interviews with the parties concerned and court transcripts.

The focal point is the case of Sunny Jacobs, a single mother-of-two whose partner Jessie would sometimes get involved with shady deals which took him away from home. On a trip to Florida his deal went wrong which left him penniless. She drove with the kids to bring him home but the car broke down when she arrived. When the offer came from her parents to wire money, Sunny and Jessie asked an aquaintance of his, ex-con Walter Rhodes, to drive them to the house it was being sent to. On route they pulled into a rest stop followed by two policemen on a routine check. Sunny, in the car, heard gunshots and covered the children,. When she got out of the car she found the policemen dead and Rhodes, holding a gun, shouting at her and Jessie to get into the police car. Rhodes car-jacked an elderly man's car and drove on with the terrified Sunny, children, Jessie and old man. Soon they were stopped by a roadblock where Rhodes was hit by police gunfire. Sunny assumed the police would believe that they were hostages but found herself and Jessie arrested. Rhodes from his hospital bed plea-bargained a deal for a life-sentence while implicating Jesse and Sunny in the shooting. Amazingly on this evidence they were both found guilty and sentenced to death. Sunny and her parents put their faith in the judicial process so never tried to get a different attourney to the court-appointed one. 17 years later she was released after an Appeals court ruled that witness testimony was falsified. But it was too late for Jessie. He had been electrocuted two years before, suffering a horrific death as the chair malfunctioned and it took 13 minutes to kill him.

Sunny's words were movingly interpreted by Stockard Channing, making a welcome return to the London stage, really making Sunny's words hit home. Also the main reason for going was to finally see my Aidan Quinn on stage... 20 years after falling under his spell as 'Des' in DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN. He read the words of Kerry Max Cook who has the dubious honour of spending the longest time on Death Row without dying, 20 years incarcerated for the murder of a 21 year old girl - even when all DNA testing pointed to a middle-aged professor she was having an affair with. It was great to see him in his London stage debut. With a cast that also included Delroy Lindo and Matthew Marsh it was a haunting experience.

I so wanted to get Aidan Quinn to sign a portrait still of him from ...SUSAN but when I came out the walking dead autograph collectors were standing in a smelly huddle around the pass door and my heart sank. I slunk off into the night, dejected at not meeting an actor I've liked for 20 years. After that the week was a procession of burst water pipes flooding the kitchen, trains breaking down halfway home, not getting a chance to play my 5 tracks at the Retro, not being able to list on eBay as I couldn't upload listings from the Lister software on my computer... I couldn't even find anything in HMV that I particularly wanted when I went on a retail therapy appointment.

Come back soon Aidan.... *sigh*