Experiencing Uncertainty in Brady's Character Anonymous 11th Grade

The play Inherit the Wind is one that exhibits contrasting characterisations of its major, influential individuals. Yet, within this contrast of personalities, each separate role is portrayed to the audience in a slightly ambiguous manner, and as a result, the congregation views him with a slight ambivalence towards some of the playwright’s dominant figures. A prime example of this complicated dramatization is the big-voiced, high-status Mathew Harrison Brady. At points in the production, Brady is often pompous and shows hubristic values with his bombast but at others, he exhibits pathetic emotions and a fragile state of mind, leading us to perceive him with empathy.

Our first impressions of Brady are that the social charisma and pretense he displays as the townspeople welcome him is affected by an underlying vulnerability that he has, which appears to us to be eating, ‘Brady is a great eater’. Retrospectively his greed seems all the more gratuitous in the sentence which reveals that not only has he just feasted on the produce of the Hillsboro community, but he had had a meal before, ‘But you see we had a lunch box on the train’. The satire in the moment when the juxtaposition of him reassuring himself that he had the support...