The stars come out

Miscarriages of justice normally leave long trails and excruciating furrows in their wake. So there will be no surprise about what a big, star-studded splash The Exonerated made in America and now deserves to achieve in London, with a dazzle of Hollywood stars joining the cast for short periods during the run.

For this documentary theatre piece, researched, compiled and edited by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, disturbs mightily. It reminds you that the death penalty can, and sometimes does, lead to the execution of the innocent.

Actors sitting in a row at lecterns, spotlights irritatingly flashing from one to another in Bob Balaban's production, read from scripts telling six, true-life stories of Americans who spent years on Death Row but were ultimately exonerated.

The victims range from Delbert Tibbs, a black poet falsely convicted of rape and murder, to Aidan Quinn in hypnotically brooding form as Kerry Max Cook, who was frequently raped during 22 years on Death Row. DNA evidence finally proved Cook innocent. So in the documentary's valuable, enlightening process, American justice comes again to seem an arbitrary, oxymoronic concept.

Unfortunately, the Blank/Jensen documentary does not fulfil its potential. The constant cross-cutting between stories is a distracting technique that makes it hard to follow each case. The attempt to cram six life stories into 90 minutes renders each infuriatingly superficial.

There is far too little about how the sextet endured years of waiting to be judicially killed, usually by the electric chair. Even so, there are compensatory aspects. I was awed and astonished by one characteristic common to the survivors' testimonies: everyone speaks eloquently, without rage or rancour, of the travesty of justice they experienced. Exceptionally,

Sunny Jacobs, incarnated with indelible, heartfelt emotion by Stockard Channing, betrays an obstinate serenity. She went to Death Row in 1976 and only walked free in 1992. By then her husband, convicted for the same murders, had died, she explained, "very, very brutally. The [electric] chair malfunctioned and made a mess of it." That "mess" meant it took 13 1/2 minutes for him to die.

The impact of Channing's performance was finally surpassed by a happening. A frail but happy-looking Sunny Jacobs emerged from the audience to embrace the actress, thereby offering a cathartic finale.

Information: 020 8237 1111. Until 11 June.

The Exonerated