It’s only LSD but I like it: the play telling the untold story about the Stones drugs bust

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ 1967 trial for drug possession at Chichester crown court is one of the most notorious incidents in the history of 60s rock. Everyone with even a passing interest in the Rolling Stones knows the salient details: the grim role of the News of the World in setting up a police raid on Richards’ country pile, Redlands; the entirely apocryphal rumours about Mars Bars and Marianne Faithfull ; the band’s brief attempt to escape the press attention by travelling to Morocco, where Richards began a long relationship with guitarist Brian Jones’s then-girlfriend Anita Pallenberg; the unexpected intervention of the Times’ editor William Rees-Mogg, protesting against the severity of the sentencing in an editorial headlined Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel? ; their subsequent release, Mick Jagger’s appearance on a hastily convened edition of the TV show World in Action , debating the whole business with Rees-Mogg, former home secretary Frank Soskice, the Bishop of Woolwich and Fr Thomas Corbishley (“a leading British Jesuit”).

But when playwright Charlotte Jones was reading up on the Redlands bust and trial, it was another, more overlooked aspect of events on which she alighted. Michael Havers was an intriguing choice of defence counsel for Jagger and Richards. He was not a barrister like John Mortimer , who seemed to delight in taking on the establishment on behalf of everyone from the editors of Oz magazine to the Sex Pistols to the publishers of Hubert Selby Jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn. Havers was the establishment, a Garrick Club member who helped wrongly convict the Guildford Four, became a Conservative MP and ultimately lord chancellor under Margaret Thatcher.

Marianne Faithfull is trodden on by the court case. She ended up a heroin addict and she traces it all back to Redlands

Moreoever, at the time of the trial, he was dealing with a very different kind of youth rebellion from Jagger and Richards ’ LSD-soaked weekend in the country. Having already declined to attend Eton as per family tradition, his son Nigel had announced his intention not to follow his father, grandfather and older brother into a legal career but instead to become an actor. “When I realised Michael Havers’ son was Nigel Havers – everybody knows who he is! – I thought: there’s a father-son story, a domestic rebellion story that an audience can really get hold of, even if they’re alienated by the bigger political or global story of the Rolling Stones,” Jones says. “They were such a symbol of rebellion but I wanted to mirror it and see how the smaller, personal rebellion is influenced by what the Stones are doing.”

To her delight, she discovered that not only had Nigel Havers been around the trial, he had become close to Faithfull, who – as Jones notes – was in some ways the biggest victim of the Redlands controversy, despite not actually being on trial nor even giving evidence. “I went to visit Marianne in Paris a few years ago, and she was really angry about Redlands. She felt it ruined her life. I really empathised with this woman who wasn’t allowed to speak at the time, but at the same time, the tabloids were writing about as Miss X.”

She goes on: “You know, they were writing about her in the same way that they wrote about Caroline Flack recently. She was really, really delighted that someone would tell her side of the story. She told me Nigel was ‘like my little brother’. There’s such a touching, beautiful unknown celebrity story in the middle of this. She helped Nigel out on his journey, but she’s kind of trodden on by the court case and shut out – the 1970s were terrible for her” – Faithfull ended up an anorexic heroin addict, at one point living on the streets of Soho – “and she traces it all back to Redlands.”

The judge managed to turn me into some folk hero overnight – and I’ve been playing up to it ever since

Keith Richards

We’re talking in a London studio during rehearsals for Redlands, which was commissioned by the Chichester Festival theatre : “a no-brainer” according to director Justin Audibert, given its setting. People can still remember bunking off school to try and catch a glimpse of the Stones at court, he says, and Richards – who still owns Redlands in the nearby village of West Wittering – remains something of a local hero. “There are loads of amazing stories about Keith doing nice things in the community: contributing money to the chapel roof repairs, joining the protests when they were going to close Chichester hospital. They love him, everyone’s got a story about him because he used to go to the pub a lot and so on. We made contact with his son Marlon, who’s been amazing. He lives in Chichester still, he’s got really local roots, he’s very beloved.”

When the rehearsals recommence, it’s very clear that Redlands isn’t a standard courtroom drama, not least because proceedings are interrupted by Jagger and Richards – played by Jasper Talbot and Brenock O’Connor respectively – breaking into a rendition of Mercy, Mercy, the Don Covay song the Rolling Stones covered on their 1965 album Out of Our Heads. Jones says she always wanted the show to feature music – “I was writing in lockdown, I thought: ‘I want a massive cast, a massive stage, music, I want it to be funny, because we’ve got no theatre at the moment’” – but she doesn’t think of it as a musical, “even though there’s eight songs in it”, the use of which the Stones’ management has approved.

“We sent the play to their people, we didn’t know if we’d get the rights. It’s been a bit of a journey, but we got there,” says Audibert, who adds that the songs used are all “pre-1967 stuff”, intended to underline what had fuelled the Stones in the first place, behind all the lurid headlines. “It was really important to me that we paid homage to the fact that what these two kids were really interested in was R&B, that bluesy, rootsy feel. We’re trying to tell that story as well.”

Judging by the rehearsal, they’ve managed to avoid what you might imagine was the biggest pitfall in depicting Jagger and Richards on stage. Both have ingrained public images that border on the cartoonish – indeed, Richards has claimed his piratical outlaw persona was born during the Redlands hearing, where “the judge managed to turn me into some folk hero overnight – I’ve been playing up to it ever since”. When someone’s spent decades building up a facade, how do you break through to reveal the person underneath?

“What you’re trying to do is get the essence of a person, avoiding all direct mimicry,” Audibert says. “You have to ask yourself about a 24-year-old Mick Jagger: he’s a bit scared of the trial, but also maybe not taking it seriously to start with – how would that feel? If it was just a kind of Stella Street impersonation, the audience wouldn’t care and the audience have got to care about them.”

The Redlands trial was an event that began to be mythologised almost the minute it finished, not least by the Stones themselves. Within weeks of its conclusion, they released the single We Love You , with an accompanying promotional clip that depicted Jagger and Faithfull as Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, with Richards as the judge presiding over Wilde’s trial. It subsequently inspired everything from books to visual art – Richard Hamilton’s painting Swingeing London 67 featured Jagger handcuffed to fellow defendant, art dealer Robert Fraser, in the back of a police van – almost all of which have hailed it as a hard-won victory for the youth counterculture over the repressive forces of the establishment.

But the truth is more complex. A contemporary poll, mentioned in the World in Action documentary, revealed that 85% of young people thought Jagger and Richards deserved to go to jail: evidence that, despite Richards’ celebrated line in court about young people not caring about “petty morals” , the counterculture hadn’t spread much beyond a clique of London hipsters.

The real fissure wasn’t between old and young, but within the British establishment, between those broadly sympathetic, like Rees-Mogg, and those who felt it represented an assault on British values: if recent years have shown us anything, it’s that said fissure certainly didn’t result in a complete collapse, nor did it do much to curb the behaviour of tabloid newspapers. Jones says Nigel Havers thought the trial changed his father a little – “he thought Mick and Keith were really bright, it kind of softened him; certainly he relished his son’s career as an actor” – but it clearly didn’t turn him into a liberal, as his controversial tenure as attorney general proved.

“I don’t think there’s a single message to the play,” nods Jones. “It’s complex and imperfect, as life is. I feel that we’re in a world that’s so polemical at the moment, it’s a play about being compassionate about the people who are around you. It’s about people accommodating each other; coming together rather than facing each other off. Even the Stones dressed up in nice suits for the appeal.”

• Redlands is at Chichester Festival theatre, 20 September-18 October