THE OLD RELIGION by David Mamet, Faber, $170 IN 1914, the Jewish factory owner Leo Frank died a brutal and humiliating death. Falsely accused of raping and murdering an employee in the stairwell of his own factory, he was tried and convicted on the basis of trumped-up evidence and sentenced to death.
But when the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, he was dragged out and lynched by a mob.
This was the American Deep South, the home turf of the Ku Klux Klan. The self-righteous Christian majority had found its scapegoat not in a black, for once, but in a Jew, the outsider in its midst. It wanted to believe him guilty.
From the prosecuting lawyer to the mealy-mouthed defence attorney, from the factory girls who concocted stories of Frank's sexual harassment and alleged physical deformities to the readily credulous jury, the whole community conspired in his conviction and death.
Sadly, the story of Leo Frank is not fiction but based on a real event.
Yet, in David Mamet's carefully researched and sensitively crafted reworking, the violence and the courtroom drama are only briefly centre-stage.
