A Few Good Men

A Few Good Men begins with a young marine dead in his barracks and two of his fellows charged with killing him. The lawyer assigned to defend them has never seen the inside of a courtroom and has no intention of going near one. He plans to plead it out and go home.

Lieutenant Kaffee is good at deals and bad at conviction. His co-counsel thinks the case is worth fighting; the accused insist they were following an order that officially does not exist; and the officer who may have given it is a decorated colonel who does not expect to be questioned by anybody. Getting to the truth requires putting him on the stand, which is either a strategy or a career-ending mistake.

Aaron Sorkin wrote the play, which had its first production in 1989, before he adapted it for the screen. The stage version is a courtroom drama in the classic shape — testimony, objection, cross-examination — and the writing is built on the rhythm of people arguing at speed.

Underneath the procedure it is about the difference between orders and responsibility, and about institutions that produce both protection and cruelty using the same machinery. Nobody in it is simply wrong, which is what makes the final confrontation land as hard as it does.

It suits audiences who like courtroom drama with an argument at its centre. It works best live, where a cross-examination played out in real time, with no cuts, keeps a whole room holding its breath.