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. He sometimes gets so angry on the job because of what he sees, the people he meets, he goes home with a blinding headache. ‘We all get them sometimes,’ he admits to Armitage. ‘The ones that make you question everything.’ And what about Armitage, ambitious, impatient, keen to escape the black stereotype? When he’s confronted by a black kid so rotten he gives other black kids a bad name, he sees ‘nothing but a red mist’.
Are we, then, all racists, of one sort or another? How would we have responded to temptation, provocation, absolute absence of opportunity? Brave, brutal questions for an afternoon on 4 from a play directed by Jessica Dromgoole with brilliant simplicity.
On the World Service this week, The London Chronicles, produced and presented by Francesca Panetta, gave us the city as urban jungle, a place of fear, as well as of greater safety for those who come here to escape, make their lives anew, find a home. We’ll be hearing a lot more of this kind of thing as the Olympics approach and London becomes the centre of the world for a fortnight. No bad thing as it’s an opportunity for us to reassess what London is as a capital, a metropolis, a gathering of peoples. Does it still represent the best that Britain has to offer? Or are the August riots of 2011 and the violence on the Clapham Park Estate (‘two shootings, five stabbings and a fatal’ in a matter of weeks) representative of what London has become?
Panetta talked to a young man who records his conversations with people on the Tube, asking them where they are going and why. The ‘lines of life’ lived in London are as varied as the roads. She spoke to an immigrant who told her, ‘I’m still Indian in my mind. It’ll take me a few years to be a proper Londoner.’ But now, with so many kinds of Londoner, what did he have in mind?
On The Fifth Floor, a new series on the World Service taking us behind the stories that are making the headlines by talking to the reporters from the 27 different language services who bring us those stories, we heard from Mohammed Ballout, who works for the Arabic language service. When he arrived in Libya to report on the violent uprising against Gaddafi, ‘I saw a lot of students and young immigrants to Libya …who were trying to change the country, to participate…But they discovered that war is really different from the movies.’ They had no training, no experience. He once saw 30 of them in the morning leave for a sortie, but only 10 to 15 came back.
Ballout himself was wounded by a bullet that killed two rebel soldiers he was standing next to before entering him in the shoulder, travelling through his chest and his lung and coming to rest close by his heart. He grew up in Beirut during the war years of the 1970s. ‘It was very good experience to survive in the war environment. Without that I don’t think I would still be alive.’
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