GUANTANAMO. To 4 September.
London
GUANTANAMO HONOUR BOUND TO DEFEND FREEDOM'
by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo
Tricycle Theatre To 12 June 2004
Transfers to New Ambassadors Theatre 16 June-4 September 2004
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Thu (from 1 July) & Sat 2.30pm
Runs 2hr 5min One interval
TICKETS: (New Ambassadors) 0870 060 6627
Review: Timothy Ramsden 24 May 2004 at Tricycle Theatre
A devastating show, its cool manner giving space to its shocking contents things that are continuing today.One strand of programming at Kilburn's Tricycle Theatre has been the edited documentary presentation of inquiries and tribunals. There has been no open inquiry into Guantanamo. Very little here comes from the prison-camp itself mainly a censored letter (not very effectively censored as the offending phrases seem to have got out).
Guantanamo is the little bit of the USA in Cuba, where people suspected of terrorist links are being detained. Three things are clear about Guantanamo: there is ill-treatment of prisoners, many are unlikely to be guilty, and there's no internationally-recognised status for place or people.
And that's putting it mildly. A more partisan view might be that it's a place where a vengeful superpower relieves its wounds by torturing innocent people without regard for civilised conventions. Coming out of the performance, it's hard to think that would be partisan at all. Coming out of it after news of US treatment of Iraqui prisoners, it's possible to believe more speculative points raised here: that Guantanamo prisoners are transferred to unknown torture-camps round the world, that information' on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction could have come from some agonised victim saying what the men operating the bludgeons, electrodes or whatever, wanted to hear.
The documentary form's open to criticism: in selection, in actors using words without exploring subconscious motivations (if they do it wouldn't be true to surface behaviour), in the calculated intermix of testimony with scenes of prisoners being manhandled.
But the concerns even a US army prosecutor, a British Lord of Appeal in Ordinary and a lawyer have, are convincing. If, in utter paranoia, it's said that terrorist-types can always put up a good front, how come the USA Secretary of Defence, in a brief funny-if-it-weren't-horrific appearance, is so unconvincing?
Of course, there's nothing out of the ordinary about Guantanamo (compared with the environmental damage the US government is willing to risk, it's possibly long-term small beer in overall cost to human lives). But in this post-Gulag creation, while the US government may not be unique, it's siding up alongside those whose ways it has always held abhorrent.
The Lord Steyn/Donald Rumsfeld: William Hoyland
Mr Begg: Badi Uzzaman
Wahab al-Rawi: Aaron Neil
Jamal al-Harith: Patrick Robinson
Gareth Pierce: Jan Chappell
Mark Jennings/Greg Powell: Alan Parnaby
Bisher al-Rawi/Major Dan Mori: Daniel Cerqueira
Moazzam Begg/Mr Ahmed: Paul Bhattacharjee
Tom Clarke: Theo Fraser Steele
Ruhel Ahmed: Tariq Jordon
Clive Stafford Smith: /Jack Straw: David Annen
Directors: Nicolas Kent, Sacha Wares
Designer: Miriam Buether
Lighting: Johanna Town
Sound: John Leonard
2004-05-25 12:33:01