September 22, 2011
When veteran director Max Stafford Clark was asked about the future of theatre, he replied:
‘I think the most significant moment of the last 15 years will be the influence of journalism’. Bang Bang Bang, his most recent collaboration with his Irish playwright wife Stella Feehily, is testament to this. After many hours of research, interviews were transformed into Feehily’s typically searing dialogue and the result staged with tension, suspense and a good deal of horror by Stafford Clark’s own excellent Out of Joint theatre company.
‘You get a cook, a cleaner, a driver, and you get paid,’ seasoned humanitarian aid worker Sadhbh (Orla Fitzgerald) tells idealistic rookie colleague Mathilde (Julie Dray), in the comparative safety of Sadhbh’s North London flat. ‘I’ll be watching out for you,’ she adds, almost as an afterthought. What could go wrong? London’s Holloway, after all, is a bit edgy, manifested in what Sadhbh’s long-suffering ex-aid worker partner Stephen describes as ‘the rhythm of flat life’. It is this life that Sadhbh is turning her back on, impelled by a self-appointed mission to bear witness to atrocities borne by others. It takes the chaos of the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo to make a girl feel alive and indispensable.
The terror of the first scene puts paid to this fantasy. Babon Ceesay’s gun and torrent of abuse (veering crazily between French and English) is implacable. The violence is as impersonal as a tsunami. What follows is anything but. Suddenly, bursting into their lives lived elsewhere, the reality of conflict climaxes. Everything else is flash back or flash forward.
You either tell it as it is, as poor, broken Amala (Pena Iiyambo) whispers into the ear of her heroic refugee camp protector Mama Carolina (Frances Ashman) – or you refuse to talk. Like Sadhbh, you may be a witness and recorder of others’ catastrophes, compiling high-minded evidence for distant European justice; but of your own experience - not a word.
‘I’m not going to be your New York Times story’, the celebrated aid worker retorts to a journalist’s question. ‘We’re locked into a relationship whether you like it or not. You give me a story. I bring it to the public. You get focus on Congo. Your organisation gets more recognition. Mutual responsibility,’ Paul Hickey’s louche hack replies.
Feehily’s script constantly challenges common hectoring, moralising clichés. Local warlord Colonel Mburame taunts Sadhbh over a cup of tea (‘The white angel from the West – come to drag me to the Hague’) - but when he describes watching as a child while the Blue Berets stood by as his village was torched, his mother killed with an hammer by killers ‘who did not want to waste a bullet’, Sadhbh is lost for words. In a surprising moment of erotic charge, he instructs Sadhbh to touch his head and feel 'the scar of a survivor'.
A gun-toting child in uniform interrogates unarmed aid workers on Premier League footballers; they bargain for their lives with chewing gum and Adidas sports gear. ‘It’s OK, it’s OK’, Sadhbh soothes. ‘Good. Because I’d rather not be shot in the face by an eight year old’. The stage direction instructs ‘through gritted teeth’. Sadhbh's character does rather have this effect on the audience. But she's hard to forget.
See this play - and share the guilt. There’s plenty to go round.
‘I think the most significant moment of the last 15 years will be the influence of journalism’. Bang Bang Bang, his most recent collaboration with his Irish playwright wife Stella Feehily, is testament to this. After many hours of research, interviews were transformed into Feehily’s typically searing dialogue and the result staged with tension, suspense and a good deal of horror by Stafford Clark’s own excellent Out of Joint theatre company.
‘You get a cook, a cleaner, a driver, and you get paid,’ seasoned humanitarian aid worker Sadhbh (Orla Fitzgerald) tells idealistic rookie colleague Mathilde (Julie Dray), in the comparative safety of Sadhbh’s North London flat. ‘I’ll be watching out for you,’ she adds, almost as an afterthought. What could go wrong? London’s Holloway, after all, is a bit edgy, manifested in what Sadhbh’s long-suffering ex-aid worker partner Stephen describes as ‘the rhythm of flat life’. It is this life that Sadhbh is turning her back on, impelled by a self-appointed mission to bear witness to atrocities borne by others. It takes the chaos of the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo to make a girl feel alive and indispensable.
The terror of the first scene puts paid to this fantasy. Babon Ceesay’s gun and torrent of abuse (veering crazily between French and English) is implacable. The violence is as impersonal as a tsunami. What follows is anything but. Suddenly, bursting into their lives lived elsewhere, the reality of conflict climaxes. Everything else is flash back or flash forward.
You either tell it as it is, as poor, broken Amala (Pena Iiyambo) whispers into the ear of her heroic refugee camp protector Mama Carolina (Frances Ashman) – or you refuse to talk. Like Sadhbh, you may be a witness and recorder of others’ catastrophes, compiling high-minded evidence for distant European justice; but of your own experience - not a word.
‘I’m not going to be your New York Times story’, the celebrated aid worker retorts to a journalist’s question. ‘We’re locked into a relationship whether you like it or not. You give me a story. I bring it to the public. You get focus on Congo. Your organisation gets more recognition. Mutual responsibility,’ Paul Hickey’s louche hack replies.
Feehily’s script constantly challenges common hectoring, moralising clichés. Local warlord Colonel Mburame taunts Sadhbh over a cup of tea (‘The white angel from the West – come to drag me to the Hague’) - but when he describes watching as a child while the Blue Berets stood by as his village was torched, his mother killed with an hammer by killers ‘who did not want to waste a bullet’, Sadhbh is lost for words. In a surprising moment of erotic charge, he instructs Sadhbh to touch his head and feel 'the scar of a survivor'.
A gun-toting child in uniform interrogates unarmed aid workers on Premier League footballers; they bargain for their lives with chewing gum and Adidas sports gear. ‘It’s OK, it’s OK’, Sadhbh soothes. ‘Good. Because I’d rather not be shot in the face by an eight year old’. The stage direction instructs ‘through gritted teeth’. Sadhbh's character does rather have this effect on the audience. But she's hard to forget.
See this play - and share the guilt. There’s plenty to go round.