Well done, the Royal Court. It’s got the art of audience abuse down to a tee. The queue for the tiny studio theatre snakes up an airless flight of stairs and bottlenecks into a doorway where each play-goer receives a personalised earbashing from an usherette. ‘Hello, did you hear all that? It’s one hour straight through. No readmission. No recording. No photography. No mobile phones. No sitting on the reserved chairs. No treading on the floor on the way to your seat. Enjoy the show. Hello, did you hear all that…?’ and so on.
The floor we mustn’t tread on is strewn with a layer of sacred grit which the director insists will remain untouched by human sole before the show begins. It’s a strange start (and a lot of play-goers scuff up the crunchy sprinklings by accident). But being treated as an intrusive vandal whose sense of pleasure needs to be torpedoed on arrival has the advantage of lowering one’s expectations.
The play, Truth and Reconciliation, is the brainchild of debbie tucker green, a writer who dwarfs the initials of her name in a show of power-crazed meekness. Her script is heavy on the air miles. We flit between six or seven troubled locations — South Africa, Rwanda, Ulster, Bosnia, etc. — and we meet traumatised families as they prepare to hear terrible truths about their murdered loved ones. Mundane details are the focus. A nervy couple bicker pointlessly. A bereaved granny whines about her hard chair. A morose teenager smokes with frantic anxiety. The aim is to illuminate great suffering through everyday superficialities. It’s like war photography reproduced on stage. Fair enough. But we get the idea after two minutes.
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