Despite the abject failure of Lord Archer's play The Accused he has done the theatre some service

Despite the abject failure of Lord Archer's play, The Accused, he has done the theatre some service. The play and his own performance did give the critics, long starved of a stinker on which to sharpen their pens, the chance to write some memorable reviews. Despite the abject failure of Lord Archer's play, The Accused, he has done the theatre some service. The play and his own performance did give the critics, long starved of a stinker on which to sharpen their pens, the chance to write some memorable reviews. Michael Coveney of the Daily Mail thought merely allowing the audience to vote on his guilt and innocence was insufficient after enduring such an evening.

"The audience might have done better to form a lynch mob instead," he said, and seeing Archer perform was like "watching a talking clock vainly trying to speak".Capital punishment metaphors predictably featured in the reviews. Robert Gore-Langton, of the Daily Express, said acting that bad "deserves the gibbet".The Daily Telegraph's Charles Spencer considered Archer's stilted dialogue, saying the playwright couldn't spot a cliché "without rushing to embrace it like a long-lost chum". His writing, he said, "has all the lightness of the suet pudding they used to serve at my prep school".Paul Taylor, of The Independent, was unsparing. "This leaden and incompetent play leaves you little option but to find its hero innocent and to find everything else (dialogue, legal acumen, structure, and so on) as culpable as all hell ... The author's self-belief is breathtaking and farcical."All the critics enjoyed taking the courtroom metaphors to the limit at Archer's expense.

The Guardian's Michael Billington wrote: "What one can say is that, as drama, the piece takes an age to get going and is full of plonking exit lines and musty forensic trickery."The suspense, such as it is, rests on how Lord Archer will perform when it is his turn to act. To be fair, he inflicts cruel and unusual punishment on himself by being forced to witness his own play in virtual silence for the first two acts. But, in the third act, he takes the stand and delivers his lines with the over-rehearsed sing-song of a man apparently reading from an invisible autocue."The Sunday Telegraph's John Gross tried to be kind. He was averse to hitting a man "when he might be about to go down", he said, but had to report of the play that "much of it is downright corny and some of it is startlingly inept".. It has not been Jeffrey Archer's year.

He has been bailed to face charges for perjury; he has been expelled from the Conservative Party; and now he has been told to kindly leave the stage It has not been Jeffrey Archer's year. He has been bailed to face charges for perjury; he has been expelled from the Conservative Party; and now he has been told to kindly leave the stage. Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare's dream of taking the West End by storm has ended in failure. His play and his own performance were ridiculed by the critics; and even the novel notion of seeing Archer in the dock on stage a few months before he is in the dock in real life, has not been enough to bring in audiences.Two weeks after his play, The Accused, opened at London's Theatre Royal, Haymarket, Lord Archer has decided to close it down. The run will finish on 20 January, six weeks earlier than planned.West End sources estimate that the production will have lost up to £250,000. The same sources estimate that Lord Archer's acting career is now worth next to nothing.The Accused, which Archer wrote while locked in his home during the scandal over revelations about his libel case, is a courtroom drama in which Archer himself plays a man accused of murdering his wife.Judged by many in its audiences to be so bad that it was funny, it did at least have the interesting device of allowing the audience to act as jury at the end and vote electronically on the innocence or guilt of the character Archer was playing.What Lord Archer may have failed to realise was that the neon sign that went up at the end giving the numbers voting guilty and not guilty also gave the exact figure of how many were in the audience each night. To the cast's embarrassment, the figure displayed at the end of the evening grew more worrying night by night. The Theatre Royal, Haymarket, can accommodate 900 people but on some nights the "jury" only amounted to slightly more than 400.Yesterday a spokesman said that Lord Archer would not be making any comment.

This marked a change from the run-up to the show's opening when Archer wooed journalists, holding lunches with them to talk about the play and promising that his West End stage debut was just the beginning of a new career.Lord Archer had been talking with producers about acting in a Hollywood movie. Curiously, no Hollywood producers have yet made public their belief that Archer will be the next Mel Gibson or Russell Crowe.In fact, the cliché-ridden play's most dramatic moment came off-stage on its very first night in the regions, when it opened in Windsor. By a remarkable coincidence, the first performance was also the day that Archer was charged with committing perjury. That provoked such a rush of journalists to Windsor that for the first and last time tickets for the production were being sold on the black market for up to £200.One paper noted that even Charles Dickens and Evelyn Waugh might have struggled to depict a character who is charged with committing perjury on the same day as he appears in the regional premiere of his own play as a man accused of murdering his wife.Both Dickens and Waugh would have guessed yesterday's denouement, though; it was all too inevitable.. The Ministry of Defence today admitted the Army is under strength by 8,000 personnel and unlikely to reach full capacity for another eight years. The Ministry of Defence today admitted the Army is under strength by 8,000 personnel and unlikely to reach full capacity for another eight years. Its annual performance report said there were significant shortages in four areas - the infantry, the Royal Artillery, the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers and the Royal Signals.It found the UK had just 100,300 personnel, compared to the 108,000 required.Chief of Defence Staff Sir Charles Guthrie said there was little chance forces would reach their necessary strength until three years after the previously planned 2005.He also revealed shortages in trained medical, nursing and dental personnel.Gen Guthrie said that, with the pool of young people available for recruitment declining, manning would be the single most critical element to shape the armed forces of the 21st century.Defence sources highlighted the high wastage rates during training, with only a quarter of those entering a recruiting office actually making it into the Army..