Lynda Bruce and Sandy Burns’ new play confronts the issues of privacy, manipulation, and perhaps most importantly love and the willingness to embrace that by putting aside differences in order to work together. Set in present day America, Mr William Carpenter (Will Lyman) is the country’s leading playwright and has made his name primarily due to his scepticism of the Bush administration and the way in which it portrays all terrorists as brutal murderers while justifying their own similar behaviour by assuming the title “freedom fighters”. However, his world is seemingly thrown into chaos and dilemma when Councillor Goodman (Robert Pemberton) threatens him with trial in front of a military court and a possible sentence in Guantanamo if he refuses to write a play advocating unity against terrorism. Indeed, there are some similarities with Christopher Marlowe’s great play Dr Faustus, but unlike Faustus, our leading man has an apparently more difficult choice to make. The resulting scenes show Mr Carpenter struggling with the impossible situation he is faced with, and seeing his life spiral more and more out of control. There are some wonderfully symbolic flashbacks, and we find out that his son, Frank (Richard Arum), is a hard-line Republican who was once a marine, whilst his wife spent her final disease ridden years desperately trying to keep the two away from each other’s collars. The play’s climax is a wonderfully directed scene between William and Frank, as each go against their natural beliefs to pull together. As son tells father he’ll be supporting him in the military court the following today and then goes on to embrace him, I shed a tear. I challenge you not to do the same.
My one gripe with the show was its space – a tiny black box theatre which slightly restricted the amount the actors could move around, and certain scenes felt like they needed a bit more of an injection of movement. This is a very minor gripe however, and Will Lyman’s fantastically truthful performance twinned with a terrifically relevant script ensures this is a production you will not forget. In order to tackle the problems of terrorism, we have to look beyond just our side of the coin, and confront the problem face to face. This does not necessarily mean with violence, terror – after all, as Mr Carpenter says, is terror not just an emotional state?
[John C Kennedy]
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