A mosaic of mayhem
The title of Robin Soans's latest, disappointingly diffuse piece of documentary theatre misleads. For Talking to Terrorists includes not only the testimony of contemporary importers of fear, bombings and death to several countries, it also offers the recollections of two unnamed secretaries of state (obviously Mo Mowlam and Norman Tebbit) a colonel, a former ambassador and envoy and others variously caught up in the terrorism business.
The sweeping expansiveness of Soans's purview proves a tactical mistake. Talking to Terrorists, which aims to discover what drives ordinary people to commit extraordinary acts, lacks form and a governing sense of purpose. It emerges as a shapeless, aimless rag-bag, a mosaic of reminiscence and revelation on a bare stage. It shocks, enrages and disturbs in this superlatively acted production but does not freshly illuminate.
Soans's authorial responsibility was to edit and organise verbatim interviews that he, director Max Stafford-Clark and the actors collected from all over the world. The organisation of the material strikes me as haphazard and undramatically meandering.
The focus is unclear. What have members of the IRA, Ulster Volunteer Force, Kurdish Workers Party and the Bethlehem ex-head of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade in common, aside from their experience of being savagely suppressed by their enemies or authoritarian government? Why are Muslims not accorded more space or significance?
Politicians, such as June Watson's plain-speaking Mowlam and Christopher Ettridge's angry old Tebbit, who recalls the Brighton bombing, loom distractingly large. Our former ambassador to Uzbekistan, amusingly presented by Jonathan Cullen as sexually naive and morally courageous, protests about that country's tendency to boil people alive.
In the documentary's sharpest scene, meticulously directed by Stafford-Clark, the ambassador is recalled and reminded to toe the British line of subservience to America. These, though, are asides. The main terrorist picture comes fuzzily across. Be warned: the theatre's air conditioning system isn't working.
Until 30 July. Information: 020 7565 5000.
