Trevor Nunn's enjoyable revival of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's 1955 courtroom drama, Inherit the Wind, now at London's Old Vic, is unsurprisingly dominated by its two central performances. As rival counsels, the swift-witted Chicagoan William Drummond and the biblical literalist Matthew Harrison Brady, Kevin Spacey and David Troughton, verbally dance around one another in a captivating fashion, sparring and sparking.

The play is a fictionalized account of the 1925 Scopes Trial which pitted Darwinism against Christianity and, in Lawrence and Lee's McCarthy era retelling, became emblematic of the vital need to defend the right of freedom of thought and speech, a topic that still reson[...]