Seemingly frustrated by the inability to re-create the Florida plains in the confines of a theatre, writer Emma Reeves decides instead to chart another area of unexplored wilderness - the mind of Luke Jackson.
This is a mistake which goes punished repeatedly in a gutsy but flawed adaptation of Donn Pearce's brutal tale of a life on the chain gang.
For Cool Hand Luke is an enigma, a man who smiles when there's no cause for joy, a man who is both selfless and self-absorbed, a man who can rage placidly.
And, as his cohorts in the Florida jail attempt to knit together the strands of a contradictory persona, they create something of a messianic proportion, they create the Cool Hand Luke they need, rather than the one they get.
To have Luke tell us his mind, to parade his back story and bring alive a host of unconvincing demons turns him from rebellious hero into yet another attention-seeking fruitcake off the production line.
That is in no way to dismiss the winning performance of Marc Warren who holds the piece together with his starry presence and flashes of twinkle-eyed charm.
He is suitably charismatic and laconic and should have been left alone to grow Luke rather than shout him out. (He also deserves a more authentic nemesis than Richard Brake's fey Boss Godfrey.)
There are good things in this laboured production. Lee Boardman gives Dragline a credible edge while the iconic "50 egg" scene turns into a neat compilation of nerve, comedy and sleight of hand.
However, the lack of menace, the clunky insertion of unconvincing flashbacks and dead-handed direction by Andrew Loudon kill any sense of menace or foreboding.
This is supposed to be a drama of barely uttered dreams. That Emma Reeves demands her inmates share their pain turns a prison for hard-boiled crims into a soft-centred episode of Educating Essex.
– From October 2011
