Christopher Hydon revives Reginald Rose's play, based on his own culturally important 1957 film, proving that personal prejudices and the law make for an explosive combination and remains as hardhitting and vital today as it was at the apex of the civil rights movement in America.

WHAT IS IT ABOUT?

A group of 12 all-male jurors must decide once and for all on an unanimous verdict of murder, which the judge has warned them carries a mandatory death sentence for the accused, a young Hispanic man. A guilty verdict would certainly send him to face the electric chair.

The jurors, whose names we never discover, all carry their own beliefs and prejudices against the accused, and combined with an urgency to carry on with their own lives (including tickets to a baseball game that evening), they are almost ready to deliver a guilty verdict - until one dissenting voice, that of Tom Conti's Juror 8 - calls for a closer examination of the case facts, much to the chagrin of his colleagues and in particular, a bigoted nemesis in the form of Juror 3, played by Jeff Fahey, who believes that all minorities are automatically guilty of crimes they are accused of.

What follows is an intense and emotionally charged argument of the facts, accusations of prejudice, and at one point threatens to break into violence.

Reginald Rose based his original film screenplay on his own experience of jury service in New York in 1954, a time when racial discrimination could literally mean life or death, depending on the all-white jurors and their sympathies. It remains a topic relevant of discussion today; even with mixed-raced juries commonly the norm, how free of personal prejudices are jurors, when making the life-changing judgement of another?