THE WITNESS
Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, London SW1
Opened 8 June, 2012
****

Last year Vivienne Franzmann’s classroom drama Mogadishu announced her as a playwright not just to watch, but to watch keenly and with absorption. Her second play, The Witness, intensifies that sense. I cannot remember when last I saw a play which was so open and direct without also descending periodically into crassness.
    
The play’s press release describes it as a thriller of modern morals “set against the deep background of the Rwandan genocide”, to which the natural response is “deep background… yeah, right”. But it is true: the dramatic impulse of this three-hander comes not from the genocide, but from responses to it and to its consequences, each on a human scale. Joseph is a celebrated war photographer, now semi-retired and almost in hiding from his own past; Alex, whom he and his (since deceased) wife adopted after rescuing her from the scene of a Rwandan massacre, is as the play opens apparently returning to their Hampstead home from her first year at Cambridge. The third character, Simon, appears after the interval; he is Alex’s brother, reunited with her for the first time since that childhood ordeal. The second hour of the play maps Alex’s (and our) initial uncertainties over Simon’s bona fides, then Joseph’s increasing insecurities as the truth emerges about that crucial moment. Even the two sizeable secrets revealed during this act seem to emerge not for reasons of dramatic convenience but as an organic product of the characters’ moods and interactions.
    
Danny Webb is terrific as Joseph: blunt, jaded, occasionally inappropriate in his relationship with Alex but not culpably so… he allows his unreasonableness to well up as he flakes with jealousy over Simon’s increasing closeness to his daughter. As Alex, Pippa Bennett-Warner is a match for Webb. Her first-act speech about sitting in a Cambridge lecture when suddenly confronted with an iconic photograph of herself as an infant, and having to deal with both her own and others’ responses to it, is a marvellous piece of writing, delivered with quiet intensity and not an atom overdone. David Ajala as Simon has a job to keep up with his fellows. Lizzie Clachan’s comfortable in-the-round living-room set has its seating steeply raked, giving just a hint of courtroom as we in turn witness how both personal and global history can be fabricated.

Written for the Financial Times.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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