The Trial of Jane Fonda, Park Theatre, review: Worthy and informative but rather pedestrian

It is excessively difficult to relate Anne Archer's Fonda to the figure from the fascinating footage

Anne Archer as Jane Fonda in The Trial of Jane Fonda at London's Park Theatre (Keith Pattison)

In Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1988, Jane Fonda met with a group of Vietnam vets who were attempting to stop her film, Stanley and Iris, from being shot in the locality. Her vociferous protests against the war still rankled with them and they remained incensed by her controversial 1972 trip to Hanoi, during which she was photographed laughing and clapping astride a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun. She was branded “Hanoi Jane” and the pin-up of Barbarella became the image on the urine mats in the toilets used by American soldiers out there. The vets in Waterbury are not about to let her forget this.

Terry Jastrow’s well-intentioned but somewhat lumpen play imagines what happened during the Connecticut encounter, his treatment of the title character (played here by his wife, Anne Archer of Fatal Attraction fame) informed by the fact that he retraced the actor/activist’s steps in Hanoi and talked to her hosts and guides in an effort to ascertain what she actually did – and indeed, what would have been possible for her to do, given the circumstances. He also interviewed Fonda herself, who otherwise has no association with the piece. The confrontational format – five very angry men (in reality, it was 26), who are still struggling with the emotional and physical repercussions of the war, versus a superstar who is perhaps too confident that they will be placated by hearing her side of the story – bursts with dramatic potential. But Joe Harmston’s production, though strongly cast, is unable to disguise how rarely the play flares into unpredictable life.

Portraying 1980s-vintage Fonda, Archer starts off as the picture of haughty calm and grace verging on smugness, with her sleek coiffure and impeccably smart-casual outfit. It is excessively difficult, though, to relate this person to the figure on the fascinating archive footage that we see. The video clips are, in truth, the most vital part of the evening, covering not just Fonda’s activities but summoning up the entire shameful era – the Kent State shootings in 1970, say, or a chilling audio sequence between Nixon and Kissinger about bombing strategies. It was to bear witness to the hushed-up US bombing of the country’s lifeline of dykes that Fonda agreed to make the two-week trip to North Vietnam.

The problem, however, in this research-heavy piece is that Fonda sounds too unruffled by the current combustible situation as she gives the men a fluent lecture on her politicisation and the growth of the anti-war movement, and the vets come across as types rather than fully fleshed-out individuals. So the turning point feels mechanical rather than cathartic when Fonda, now realising the true depth of the hurt she has caused, apologises for the fact that, in being anti-war, she gave the impression of being anti-soldier too, as in her pious broadcasts to American military on Radio Hanoi, and for her mortifying naivete in allowing herself to be photographed in what she now concedes was a set-up by the North Vietnamese. There’s a similar over-schematic air (“I don't know why I am telling you this, except that you have spoken from the heart. Now I speak from mine”) when the vets start to confess to their own doubts and failures, therapy-group fashion, almost as if with post-Iraq hindsight. Worthy and informative but rather pedestrian.

To 20 August; 020 7870 6876