He writes about the stuff you’d rather not know, prefer not to think about, pretend to ignore. But it lives on with you in the mind. It won’t let you go. By his words, the sharp, brittle, spot-on dialogue, he forces you to recognise the limitations of your experience, your understanding. Roy Williams’s new trilogy of plays for Radio 4, The Interrogation, takes three predictable situations — a Premier League footballer rapes an underage girl, a white woman batters her racist husband to death with a brick, a black kid joins a gang and shoots dead a young mother — and fills in the details behind those black-and-white headlines. It’s not the story outline that matters, but the characterisation, the way the people speak, the language they use. Each of the characters is so clearly differentiated you know exactly what they look like without a detail being given to us. Through the conversation, the interaction, we gather in the back story, we get the gist.
Each play begins with the victim/perpetrator telling us their side of the story first. Not, as you might expect, what they’ve done but how they got to be in the situation that led to the interview room and the interrogation by DS Matthews (played by Kenneth Cranham) and his sidekick DC Armitage (Alex Lanipekun). This means we don’t know whether we should sympathise with them, or be horrified by what they’re supposed to have done. There are no easy answers. It’s life, messy life, the life we’d rather not think about as we listen to the radio, doing the ironing, making marmalade, cocooned mostly from the nasty, brutish world dealt with by others on our behalf.
Who is better than whom? The senior detective, Matthews, who we soon surmise is white simply from his banter with Armitage? He’s a bigot about the Yanks and the French.
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