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.