Rough Justice, Oxford Playhouse, review Responsible for the longest-running and most daftly titled comedy to have graced the West End - There's A Girl in My Soup, which opened in 1966 and didn't come off until 1973 - Terence Frisby, still going strong himself, has also given the world, among other credits, this gripping courtroom drama about the fall-out from the death, at parental hands, of a brain-damaged baby. Tom Conti, who memorably played the role of a paralysed man seeking the right to die in Brian Clark's Whose Life Is It Anyway? (1978) - winning both an Olivier in the West End and a Tony on Broadway a year later - here tackles a part originally created in 1994 at the Apollo by Martin Shaw. James Highwood is in the dock trying to convince a judge - and crucially we the jury, in whom he places utmost faith - that when he suffocated his nine-month old son with a pillow, he was acting on impulse rather than prior intention and that mercy and desperation were motivating factors not cruelty or self-interest. Such is his conviction that the layman rather than the law can grasp the complexity of human behaviour that he admits to having wished the child was dead rather than condemned to a hideous state of half-life. Seen through the objective lens of judicial expertise, though, that suggests murder not manslaughter. It's a sign of how confused we can be about this issue that on the night I saw the show the audience - invited to cast its own judgment on Highwood's actions - overruled the fictional verdict, when, as Conti then explained, the matinee crowd had taken the contrary view. Yes, that rather cumbersome device highlights how crude Frisby's method is - and there's a stack of exposition and contrivance too that James Larkin's conventional revival struggles to disguise. Yet beyond reasonable doubt, while the dramatic fare is thin, and some of the characterisation sketchy, there's ample enough intellectual meat to feed on. Conti exudes a charisma and old-world courtesy that sits persuasively beside the condescension and irascibility of Royce Mill's lofty High Court judge. There's sufficient bombast in him to convince us that he's a TV personality - with a programme on the failings of the judicial system to boot - but his air of understated agony, building to a full, gibbering crack-up under the pressure of cross-examination by Elizabeth Payne's by turns heartless and tirelessly truth-seeking prosecuting QC lends the evening its vital pathos. Well worth a look.