Hearts of darkness

Poor Robin Soans. His new play, Talking to Terrorists, opened just three days before the bombs exploded last week. Most playwrights hope that their work will have ‘some’ contemporary resonance, but not quite that much. Talking to Terrorists is a ‘documentary play’ in which actual terrorists explain why they’ve committed various atrocities. Anyone going to see it now will inevitably expect it to throw some light on the question of what makes someone become a suicide bomber. Can any play, however illuminating, withstand such intense scrutiny?

Fortunately, Talking to Terrorists is more or less up to the task. Soans, along with director Max Stafford-Clark and the eight-strong cast, spent a year interviewing a wide range of people with some experience of terrorism, from the man who planted the Brighton bomb to the ex-British ambassador to Uzbekistan, and the upshot is a fascinating mosaic of different voices, nearly all of which throw some light on the subject.

Soans’s conclusion, if that’s not too strong a word, is that terrorism involves an act of self-mutilation on the perpetrator’s part, in which he shuts down that part of the brain responsible for empathy and, in this way, avoids taking responsibility for his actions. In order to re-awaken his conscience you have to talk to him — or, rather, to listen to him — and Soans appears to believe that this play, and the way it was put together, is a model of how to tackle the problem.

Of course, this will strike some people as both platitudinous and shallow, but Soans is smart enough to include the testimony of people who don’t share his point of view. The character I identified with most in this two-and-a-half-hour play was Norman Tebbit, whose wife, Margaret, was paralysed from the neck down by the Brighton bomb.