Shyamanand Jalan’s passing, after a twin career straddling daytime law and evening theatre, made me reflect again on the closeness between these apparently unrelated vocations. The public performance that a good lawyer must put on in court and the detailed preparation that a good actor must put into his stage character, both dependent on credibility, prove that each can become the other more easily than we normally think. Not for nothing, then, does courtroom drama have such a long and respected tradition, despite its obviously static, unattractive setting. Two current productions illustrate this subgenre.

Rohit Pombra’s commendable excursion into original playwriting with Justice on Trial comes after a quarter century of directing English drama for Stagecraft. Helped by the late Amina Halim, a Stagecraft actress and criminal lawyer, Pombra had workshopped this script in 1995, but the sponsors backed out when they learnt that it concerned rape.

Thanks to Halim and to Pombra’s credit, he did not soft-pedal the graphic accounts necessitated legally, so the proceedings carry an authentic ring as the young woman fights personal trauma, social stigma and an aggressively probing cross-examination. Tiny plotting inconsistencies arise, but remain minor. Unusually, Pombra leaves the verdict to us, having distributed flyers to viewers soliciting guilty/not guilty opinions.

As the victim, Sanjana Sarkar impresses in her first major, emotionally wrenched, role (picture). Rajrupa Chakravarty and Amit Dutt respectively give the public prosecutor and defence counsel appropriately contrasting portrayals — the latter also shown as a considerate family man at home. Varying the locations, Pombra adds other short domestic scenes involving the victim’s parents and even the judge’s daughter. Sagnik Bose makes a surly, unapologetic defendant.

Spandan takes up Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men — a 1954 teleplay, unforgettably cinematized by Sidney Lumet in his movie debut starring Henry Fonda (1957) — in Ranjit Kapur’s Indianized stage version titled Ek Ruka Huya Faisla, itself converted into a Hindi film in 1986. This classic murder trial shifts to the jury chamber, where one dissenting member eventually manages to persuade the rest of reasonable doubt about the charge against the accused. Kapur’s adaptation has a big minus: the Indian legal system does not provide for a jury. For greater believability, he should have kept the American context.

However, director Ashok Singh transforms four jurors into women, correcting the obsolete American regulation permitting only men to serve, and leads the cast in an exemplary spectrum of passionate hamming (except for Kalpana Thakur, who gives the holdout a cool, level head), gradually exposing each one’s bias or prejudice. He himself occupies the top, his violent insistence on “Guilty” slowly collapsing after we realize his character’s personal reason for it. At the bottom end, Renu Roy acts her part in a surprisingly unsure, wooden way.