The Royal Court has got the autumn theatre season off to a flying start.
Opening hot on the heels of the lengthy, ambitious scope of Alexi Kaye Campbell's The Faith Machine in the Theatre Downstairs comes a short sharp shock Upstairs from the always fascinating Debbie Tucker Green. Truth and Reconciliation might only be just over an hour long but every one of these 65 minutes is taut, stinging and memorable.
A number of chairs are placed on a simple earth floor, which spreads over a circular playing space. We the audience sit around the edges of this small arena, anxiously aware that we're gathered for an important encounter. The backdrop illuminates suddenly to tell us that we're in South Africa 1998, at what is obviously a session of the country's ground-breaking Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A grandmother, mother,
son and daughter arrive. The mother refuses to sit down. She waits. We wait.
In quick, interwoven succession, Tucker Green spins us around the aftermath of some of the most brutal conflicts of recent years. We're in Rwanda 2005, Bosnia 1996, Zimbabwe 2007 and, belatedly, Northern Ireland 1999, all places where truth and reconciliation are longed for but desperately hard to come by, even in the most well-intentioned hearings. Can the former lead to the latter, even if the truth turns out to be something very different from what those who demand it expect?
Tucker Green has never been a dramatist to waste words and each hard-won statement here is thumped down like a crushing iron fist. When the South African mother (Pamela Nomvete, enormously moving) eventually speaks about the agony of a 22-year wait for news of her murdered daughter, it's impossible not to feel the wrench of her pain.
There are some who might wish for each situation to have more flesh grafted onto its bare bones but these nameless characters, we quickly accept, represent silent, suffering multitudes. The details of specific incidents would also detract from the potent universality of the notion that words might somehow make amends for violence.
Tucker Green herself directs a cast of 22 in a production that never lets up in power, pathos or atmosphere. The Court has set the bar high.
Until September 24 (020 7565 5000, royalcourttheatre.com).
Truth And Reconciliation
Jerwood Theatre At The Royal Court
Sloane Square, SW1W 8AS
