Review: The Guilty
[Donmar Warehouse || June 20th to August 15th 2026 || 1h]
Clocking in at a lean hour, The Guilty feels a little like a TV thriller that’s simply been made for the stage in ways both good and bad. A one-man show, albeit one with other voices heard through a mobile phone and a headset, it follows Joe (Russell Tovey), a police officer suspended from active duty and forced to work as a call handler in an emergency control room while he awaits trial for a potential misdemeanour. What begins as any ordinary evening in the control room, with drug addicts and whiny neighbours phoning in to ask for help, soon turns into something altogether more urgent when a woman calls from the back of a van claiming to have been kidnapped. With time running out and nowhere to go, Joe must use all of his wiles and skills to try and locate and rescue the woman without ever leaving the lonely room in which he is based.
If this sounds like copaganda, that’s because it is. Nonetheless, it is well-produced and acted copaganda, and there’s merit in that. There’s merit too in how the play builds tension, slowly at first and then suddenly in a cascade as Joe begins to lose control of the situation. With its single location and use of unseen voices to create drama, it is reminiscent of Steven Knight’s 2013 film Locke, in which Tom Hardy plays a character whose life is collapsing around him while he drives down the motorway, except here Tovey’s character is stuck in place, relying on colleagues and other officers to do the legwork while he tries to reassure the victim that help is coming.
Directed by Felix Barrett, the artistic director of Punchdrunk, The Guilty boasts effective light and sound design by Anna Watson and Gareth Fry respectively, both of which tighten the knot of suspense around the audience and help to maintain the momentum as the peril escalates. The set is basic - a few desks, a few computers, and a chair for Joe to sit at - but it’s lit like an interrogation, with Joe regularly in sharp focus as the rest of the room fades into darkness, helping to create empathy for a character who is pointedly written as temperamental, aggressive and selfish, even as he tries to go above and beyond, for reasons that only become clear in the final stretch, to rescue the victim.
Where this flounders is in Moss’ script which, while intriguing and full of red herrings and twists, never quite feels believable. The character of Joe is underdeveloped - he’s a bad cop trying to do good and regularly coming up short, and that’s about it - and with such a short runtime, we don’t really get much opportunity to know or understand him. Likewise, the various voices and other characters we hear, though superbly performed, are all loosely defined. In part, this to generate mystery; the play only works if the audience is blindsided by what happens. Yet, at the same time, it becomes difficult to invest in the story when we know so little about the people involved in it. There are also a few too many contrivances and conveniences that further neuter the impact of the storytelling.
Nevertheless, as a production this is impressive. The technical excellence of the show elevates it, and Tovey’s performance is strong with him doing great work capturing Joe’s desperation to do good and his sudden fury when things don’t go his way. As the narrative beats along and the twists pile up, Tovey maintains real control of his character, even as the plot runs away from him. Given Tovey’s… inconsistency as an actor, it’s nice to see him show off his skills here, and he is the glue that holds the piece together and imbues it with enough authenticity to prevent it from falling down around him right to the end.
This is a solid show that, if anything, needed to be a bit longer to allow the audience to get a feel for what these characters are really like and to let the drama percolate a little. It’s well directed and produced and Tovey’s performance is worth seeing, though the script never grips as it needs to, particularly towards the end when the tension is at its peak. That said, it’s good - not great, but good - and works as a human drama, albeit one seeped in copaganda that flubs it a tad when it comes to exploring what Joe did to get himself suspended and how that affects his decisions.
Tickets for The Guilty are available here.