The latest 'tribunal play' at Kilburn's Tricycle Theatre is based on the Saville inquiry into Bloody Sunday. In the current political context, it couldn't be better timed, writes Fran Yeoman in London
The Bloody Sunday inquiry came alive again this week, but the scene was neither Derry's Guildhall nor the Central Hall at Westminster. This time Lord Saville and his entourage descended instead upon the unassuming Tricycle Theatre in the heavily Irish north London community of Kilburn. This was not the law lord himself, of course, but actor Alan Parnaby and a cast of 18 others, performing in the opening night of Bloody Sunday: Scenes from the Saville Inquiry.
A brilliantly authentic recreation of key moments in that epic investigation, Saville is the latest in a series of so-called "tribunal plays" to be staged at the Tricycle by its resident director, Nicholas Kent. Along with Guardian security correspondent Richard Norton-Taylor, who edits reams of testimony into two-hour scripts, Kent has been producing verbatim tribunal plays since 1994's Half the Picture, based on the Scott inquiry's arms-to-Iraq investigation. The Nuremburg and Srebrenica tribunals came next, in 1996, followed in 1999 by The Colour of Justice, an acclaimed dramatisation of the inquiry into the murder of black London teenager Stephen Lawrence. It was not long after this, in 2000, that Kent and Norton-Taylor decided to put the Saville inquiry on the stage, and the pair cannot have envisaged the climate in which their project would come to fruition.
At that time, Tony Blair was still a relatively new and popular prime minister, and in the pre-September 11th world there was little talk of wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. Northern Ireland's power-sharing executive was, apart from a three-month hiatus, a functioning body, and Gerry Adams was being invited to meetings at the White House. That March, Lord Saville began his investigation into the 13 deaths of January 30th, 1972.
"We thought we'd probably be doing the play at the end of 2001," Kent recalls. "Because it never occurred to us this inquiry could take basically five years. We could only set a date last September, once it became obvious to us that the end was in sight."
Even late last year, though, the political mood about Northern Ireland was very different from that which prevails today. Following the Northern Bank raid and the McCartney murder, which have brought waves of condemnation crashing down on Sinn Féin and the IRA, the North has been catapulted back up the British press agenda. Kent feels that the current climate will influence how his production is received.
"The IRA has been enormously discredited over the past three months and that will have an effect on the way people look at the play, I'm quite certain," he says.
HE AND HIS cast are full of interesting ideas about how their work connects not only to the imperilled peace process, but also to the wider political agenda that has intervened in the UK since QC Christopher Clarke's opening speech to the Saville inquiry.
"There are so many things that impinge on other areas of what's happening in this country, like house arrest," says Sorcha Cusack, who plays former Mid-Ulster MP Bernadette McAliskey. Kent, meanwhile, points out that the Paras, the regiment who opened fire on Bloody Sunday, are now embroiled in accusations of murder in Iraq.
"We boast in Iraq that we learned about peacekeeping in Northern Ireland," he says. "No one ever says that Northern Ireland was one of the biggest failures the British government and the British army have ever had."
Jeremy Clyde, playing QC Michael Mansfield for the second time in a tribunal play, adds: "Relevant is an awful word, but it does impinge upon our times."
Relevant the play certainly is, and the issues it raises about political trust, military accountability and the efficacy of internment will undoubtedly be eagerly debated by its audiences, particularly as its run now coincides with a general election campaign. What leaps out most from the theatrical event, however, is not political drama but human tragedy. In selecting from the 932 witnesses that gave oral testimony to Saville, Norton-Taylor has avoided the obvious "stars", such as Edward Heath and Martin McGuinness.
"The big hitters weren't very dramatic in their testimony," says Kent. "It's those people who have personal stories to tell who are enormously important."
Clyde agrees. "I was astonished by what I've learned," he says. "The politicians are skilled at saying nothing. We can watch Newsnight every night and not learn anything, but this has been a revelation."
The play's most powerful and informative moments come from people who will be complete unknowns to most outside Ulster. From a witness box on a stage that superbly imitates the Guildhall, complete with bustling lawyers, television screens displaying statements and even the piped Vivaldi music designed to calm the nerves, Geraldine McBride, Michael Bridge and William McDonagh give their evidence.
Later comes the anonymous Soldier S, who admits firing 12 shots and then lying to the 1972 Widgery inquiry, but perhaps reveals most about the army's behaviour in recounting the pressure he was under to do so: "I was an 18-year-old soldier on Bloody Sunday. Making a statement to the Royal Military Police can be quite a frightening affair." He describes that day as "a tragedy for everyone", and while there can be little sympathy for the military men who seek to justify their fatal actions throughout the play's second act, Soldier S has a point.
Ideally, what this dramatisation would bring home to its London audiences is that the Troubles are not a story of pantomime heroes and villains but a bloody mess into which ordinary people have been dragged for 35 years. In Cusack's words, it "gives a voice" to some of the nameless thousands whose experiences have been ignored.
With the house-lights partially on throughout the performance and pages of additional testimony and information in the hefty programme, the dramatisation does at times feel more like observing an actual inquiry - a slice of reality - than watching a play. Another danger is that the production will be an exercise in preaching to the converted. Kent acknowledges that politically engaged Tricycle regulars will account for a large proportion of his audiences, and there were murmurings on opening night this week that, although excellent, Saville is unlikely to have the same impact as his two most recent verbatim plays, about the Hutton inquiry and Guantanamo.
Unlike these more contemporary topics Bloody Sunday took place more than 30 years ago and, as Cusack says: "In this country, if you're not Irish, the whole Northern Ireland question is a kind of blur." Although she hopefully contends that "if people who aren't Irish come to see the play it will be very helpful," it is debatable how many people who are not already interested in the North generally and Bloody Sunday specifically will make the trip to Kilburn.
NONE OF THIS, however, takes away from the fact that Scenes from the Saville Inquiry is a superb piece of political theatre, giving movement and sound to a tribunal that was not televised, and constructing a manageable narrative from an overwhelming quantity of testimony.
"I quite like preaching to the converted," Kent muses. "Because it strengthens those who are converted to do something about what they are converted about. It just seems extraordinary that in the 21st century you have a public inquiry but people have to go to Derry or to a small courtroom in the Royal Courts of Justice in order to participate in a democratic state."
Thanks to the Tricycle, they now have, in some sense at least, an alternative.
Like The Wrong Man, the surprisingly nuanced play by former IRA director of publicity Danny Morrison, which closed at Islington's Pleasance Theatre last week, Scenes from the Saville Inquiry highlights the terrifying, ambiguous nature of the Ulster conflict. Maybe this is a message that is starting to get across, with Morrison's play receiving positive reviews and, more importantly, the international media focusing on the bereaved McCartney sisters. Their brother, Robert, incidentally, was murdered in a bar where a busload of republicans were drinking on their return from a Bloody Sunday commemoration in Derry.
The McCartney family's story, like those told in the Tricycle's excellent addition to the growing body of verbatim theatre, should encourage us to see the messy and violent human reality behind the political drama of Northern Ireland.
Bloody Sunday: Scenes from the Saville Inquiry is at the Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn, London, until May 7. www.tricycle.co.uk