THE TRIAL OF JANE FONDA is a one-act play inspired by a meeting between the Hollywood ‘wild-child’ of Henry Fonda and angry American war vets disgusted by her visit to Hanoi and photographed with North Vietnamese soldiers sixteen years earlier.

Written and directed  by seven-time Emmy Award-winner Terry Jastrow, the production debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe in August 2014, featuring his wife, the Oscar-nominated actress Anne Archer as ‘Hanoi Jane’. The meeting took place after irate Vietnam veterans, outraged by her anti-war protests, threatened to halt shooting of the her film STANLEY AND IRIS in Waterbury, Connecticut.

She agreed to meet 26 of them (in the play there’s a lot less) in the local St Michael’s Episcopal Church on 18 June 1988 to listen to them and explain her side of the argument and her outrage at a brutal foreign policy based on a flawed ‘domino effect’ theory about the spread of Communism.

Last seen in the London in her West End debut as Mrs Robinson in THE GRADUATE at the Gielgud in 2001, Anne Archer reprises her role as Jane Fonda, which is currently running at the Park Theatre directed by Joe Harmston until mid August. I left this portrait of Anne at the venue which she signed  and dedicated for me.