****
The Judge is a gift of a role and Michael Craig excels in it, blending stroppiness, humour and fragility. Meghan Popiel’s portrayal of Sarah as a girl with a strong will but a tender heart is a perfect counterpart. Trying is a thoroughly charming play… if you want a enjoyable evening and some wonderful performances you’ll not be disappointed.
Whatsonstage.com

It’s rare to leave a theatre having been moved to laughter and tears by a production, the simplicity and integrity of which is as refreshing as it is strangely reassuring. Trying by Joanna McClelland Glass is an astonishing play. Not because it deals with fundamental issues of human existence. Not because it introduces characters at a moment of high anxiety or passionate glory. No, Trying is astonishing because it allows us to observe the interaction between an irascible old legal warhorse and his young and idealistic new secretary. Through that observation, we learn to love the characters onstage, to really care for them. Rare indeed.
Derek Bond has directed what is already an internationally-travelled and very slick play with obvious regard both for his actors and his audience. Staged in James Perkins’s Tardis-like set, which simply though effectively recreates the above-garage office of the retired US Judge Francis Biddle, Trying lets us discover the world of Washington DC in November 1967.
Michael Craig, veteran of stage and film, plays Biddle. This wonderful actor, who celebrated his eightieth birthday in January, gives a superb performance. Craig allows Biddle to bluster and blast, cajole and complain, with authoritative ease. Ever ready to counter the first sign of a split infinitive, Biddle could have been presented as a stereotypical ‘grumpy old man’. In Craig’s hands, Biddle becomes a old man with whom we can empathize and enjoy all the repeated stories and anecdotes, all the outrageous pompous remarks, and all the flashes of human emotion and warmth.
Meghan Popiel as Sarah Schorr is a worthy counterpart to Craig’s Biddle. Popiel exudes a strength, assurance, and vulnerability which add a multi-layered realism to her character. We feel we know this young woman. We recognize her weaknesses as well as her dynamism. Together, Popiel and Craig make a devastating combination, watchable from opening moment to poignantly joyful end.
Simplicity and integrity and superb acting. Trying is with me still.
A total delight, one that surely deserves a life beyond the short run at the Finborough, an unsentimental, beautifully paced two-hander that has the audience warming to their growing friendship until the poignant closing moment when Craig’s stage presence becomes simply a recorded voice on a dictating machine, bidding farewell.
John Thaxter, The Stage