I've seen Christina Pickles play everything from meek and sympathetic, put-upon women to psychotic, homicidal nuts...but this took the cake. A crazy man has admitted to her in a psychiatrist session that he was actually the murderer of a man who had a fling with his wife and framed an almost-total stranger for the deed, who now sits on Death Row and is due to be executed - sooner than later. (Osley, the murderer, should have killed his wife instead; seems every man in Sparta knew where her birthmarks were!) The condemned seems resigned to his impending execution. Dr. Allcott (Pickles) is more concerned with her public image than with seeing justice done. Indeed, the last lines of the show are her saying, despite the death of an innocent man, everything came out alright; when asked by a stunned cop, "for WHOM?" she brightly replied, "why, for ME of course!" I've seen few doctors as detestable, callous, and inhuman as she. FWIW, Pickles perfectly brings out the selfish side of the doctor without going over the top - probably a tall order, indeed.
Review of An Execution of Trust
