The lights come up to full brightness in the courtroom, and the audience is surprised to find that the ball is now in their court, literally. Is Georges Daumas guilty or not? After a few hesitant murmurs, some laughs, one audience member’s chair breaking clean in half, and a few whispered “why do you think that?” and “why not?”, Mr. le Président asks us to cast a blind vote. Hands rise. And, drumroll, Daumas is not guilty tonight. That is what we have collectively decided. But a verdict is not the same as the truth of a man. What we did not yet know, sitting there with our hands raised, was how little that acquittal would settle, and how much of Daumas it leaves unaccounted for. What he does next is something you will have to witness for yourself.

Written by Fred Azeredo and directed by Krystie Nguyen, MBC Productions’ courtroom drama, Daumas: Devil’s Advocate, follows the intriguing, real-life story of Jacques Vergès, the French-Algerian lawyer of Vietnamese origin and anti-colonial activist infamous for defending the indefensible, who appears here as Georges Daumas. On trial for treason against France, Daumas defends himself. One by one, his witnesses are called, each of them a former client, each a piece of his past returning to testify. There is Fatima Youcef, his wife and an Algerian nationalist militant. There is Gertraud Schneider, a revolutionary tried for terror, and Diego Martínez, her ex-husband and another conspirator against France. And then, most unsettling of all, there is Manfred Hofstetter, a Nazi officer. It is a parade of clients that forces one of the questions the play cares about: is there anyone a lawyer should refuse to defend?

The interactive ending opens a space for the specta(c)tors, to borrow Boal’s word, to discuss what they have just witnessed. In keeping with MBC Productions’ history of socially engaged theatre, particularly Theatre of the Oppressed, this closing punctuation lets the audience enter into dialogue, even if a little too briefly. And that brevity is worth pressing on: the blind vote I began with, the single show of hands that ends the evening, is delivered in minutes, and risks flattening exactly the moral difficulty the preceding hour has so carefully built. Still, the gesture does what theatre is meant to do. It shakes a conversation loose, and makes room for the not-so-sure answers, which, in a play about who deserves a defense and who is defending them, may be the only honest verdict available.

Daumas: Devil's Advocate, written by Fred Azeredo and directed by Krystie Nguyen, is playing at Mission Santa Cruz as part of the Montreal Fringe Festival's 2026 programming. As of this review's publication, the show has two performances remaining: Friday 19th June at 15:30 and Saturday 20th June at 22:30.
Find more information and tickets on the FringeMTL website.