The Guardian - Michael Billington (28/04/05)
Verbatim theatre is not just living journalism. If it is to succeed, it has to have the shape and rhythm of art. That was true of the Tricycle's Bloody Sunday and The Colour of Justice. And at its best it's also true of this extraordinary kaleidoscopic collage created by Robin Soans and co-produced by Out of Joint and the Royal Court.
The whole show is based on the testimony of those who have had experience of terrorism. And there is a moment in the second half when it juxtaposes the words of perpetrator and victim with a directness that would be hard to achieve in fiction. At a desk sits the ex-IRA man responsible for the Brighton bombing of 20 years ago. A few feet away stands a Tory landowner who was in the hotel on the night of the explosion. And their intersecting recollections produce remarkable theatre.
The bomber explains, with mathematical precision, how he took a room in the Brighton hotel and set the timer to explode during the Tory conference. "Of course I regret the suffering I caused," he says, "but circumstances made our actions inevitable." The female survivor who was staying in the hotel then describes the shock of the explosion, the astonishing lack of panic as people exited through the debris, and the strange air of almost wartime stoicism. The moment provides not just a tonal contrast. It pinpoints the divergence of outlook and attitude between bomber and victim in a way that is unique to theatre. It is played by Lloyd Hutchinson and June Watson at just the right unhysterical pitch.
What Soans's script does for much of the evening, however, is offer insights into terrorism and explain its multiple causes. A psychologist, smoothly played by Christopher Ettridge, is particularly enlightening in defining its origins. He pins down the need for an organising guru who eventually retreats into the background. He talks of the importance of recruiting adolescents who crave status, who like to feel they are shaping history and who have "a strong illusion of immortality". What is terrifying is that he explains how relatively easy it would be to organise such a group for such a limited, local cause as blowing up four-wheel drives in Chelsea.
The inherent danger in a show like this is that it romanticises terrorism. But it strenuously avoids this by showing how torture and oppression often create their own violent antidote, using Uganda and Kurdistan as potent examples. It never lets us forget that terrorist acts punish the innocent as well as the guilty. One of the most moving testimonies comes from an envoy, clearly Terry Waite, who found that attempted negotation turned him into a Lebanese captive. There is even a wild humour about his revelation that, pleading for something to read while incarcerated, he was offered Great Escapes by Eric Williams.
Soans's script strives hard to balance cause and effect. But it would be faux-naif to pretend that it doesn't have a political agenda. If any theme runs through the show, it is that terrorism can never be countered by retaliatory force alone. It also touches on current concerns by including testimony from the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan: the man who was recalled after revealing that CIA intelligence about armed Islamic units roaming the mountains above Samarkand was patently untrue. What the show doesn't say is that his outrage at British faith in false intelligence has led him to stand as an independent candidate in Blackburn.
But the eternal question raised by factual theatre like this is whether it does anything fictional theatre can't. Watching Max Stafford-Clark's calculatedly low-key production, I would say it does. It sheds light on a dark subject. It forces us to think about what actually constitutes "terrorism". It shows that people acquire a strange eloquence when talking about subjects close to their hearts.
It is not the only form of theatre. But this show, staged very simply against Jonathan Fensom's set of graffitti-strewn concrete blocks, is aesthetically satisfying and well acted by an eight-strong cast including Jonathan Cullen, Alexander Hanson and Catherine Russell. Just occasionally I could have done with more instant identification of who the speakers actually were. But this is a quibble in an evening that takes a subject surrounded by fear and panic and offers progressive enlightenment. At its highest point, as in the contrapuntal recollections of the Brighton bombing, it is also proves that edited memories can achieve the potency of art.
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Telegraph - Charles Spencer (29/04/05)
CHILLING, MOVING AND MESMERISING
I will be astonished if the year turns up a more important, illuminating or moving play than this. Max Stafford-Clark's Out of Joint company has a superb record with verbatim theatre, ranging from Robin Soans's A State Affair, about life on a Bradford council estate, to David Hare's devastating The Permanent Way, about the dire state of Britain's railways.
Now the company is tackling perhaps the most pressingly urgent and scary subject of our times, terrorism, against which the West is currently fighting such an amorphous, ill-defined war.
Once again compiled by Soans, Talking to Terrorists consists entirely of the words of those with direct experience of terror, elicited in interviews conducted by Soans, Stafford-Clark and a team of actor-researchers, several of whom appear in the show.
The range is amazing. We hear from a child soldier in Uganda, former members of the IRA and the UVF in Northern Ireland, from Kurds, Palestinians, and those who have seen action in Iraq. There is also an exceptionally lucid psychologist who explains just how attractive terrorism can seem to a confused teenager.
Some of the speakers are readily identifiable, among them Mo Mowlam, who proudly claims to have split Sinn Fein from the IRA and cheerfully describes Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness as "normal family men", and Norman Tebbit, whose wife was so terribly injured in the Brighton bombing. Terry Waite also gives a graphic account of what it was like to be a hostage in the Lebanon for five years and face up to imminent execution.
It has often been said that one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter, and there are moments here that make the cliché seem vividly true. The accounts of state-sponsored torture and brutality that spurred several of those we hear from into action are chilling indeed.
Soans seamlessly interweaves the testimonies, creating a flow of evidence and graphic detail that has you hanging on to every word. The accounts of human cruelty are often almost unbearable to listen to, and I shan't easily forget the description of the man who was boiled alive to obtain dubious evidence about Osama bin Laden, or the child soldier in Uganda who was supervising torture at the age of 13.
Yet, surprisingly, the play isn't entirely depressing. We hear of great courage here, as well as great suffering, of triumphs of the human spirit as well as its collapse into barbarism. There are even moments of humour. Tebbit - who, as one might imagine, takes a robust view of terrorists and yearns to take out a couple of IRA men with his shotgun - mordantly announces that he appeared barefoot at his interview to prove he hadn't got cloven hooves. And a former British ambassador in Uzbekistan, appalled by evidence of British complicity in torture, proves to be hilariously entangled with a local belly dancer.
Stafford-Clark directs a lucid and enthralling production that never nudges the audience into a response but allows us to draw our own conclusions. And there are, of course, no easy conclusions to reach, beyond the truth grasped so long ago by the ancient Greek tragedians - that blood will have blood and more blood. As the reformed UVF hard-man observes: "People who kill someone also kill part of themselves. They lose part of their humanity."
The eight actors are flawless, playing up to five parts apiece with great versatility, and resolutely refusing to milk the traumatic material for easy pathos. It is all the more moving as a result, but this is, in every respect, a truly remarkable piece of theatre.
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Mail on Sunday - Georgina Brown (02/05/05)
'unmissable'