The Scotsman  
Roland Lloyd Perry

10 October 2003

Maggy Tanner, a leftist academic in her 50s, is caught with her daughter in a terrorist bomb blast on Bond Street. A second blast at the offices of the Daily Telegraph heightens the anxiety. Maggy's mellow trade unionist husband, John, has revised his attitudes towards crime and punishment in the face of global terror. Even Maggy, after becoming a victim herself, begins to question her liberal assumption that it is better to "attack the conditions that breed the hatred."

Cut in with this is a family story: John's son from a previous marriage, David, arrives from America, and proceeds to clash with Maggy on a personal as well as political level. Twenty-seven-year-old Van Badham's play attacks the paranoid measures taken by the West sine September 11. It made the news at this year's Edinburgh Fringe, where some hailed the rebirth of political theatre, while others found it too extreme. Badham, who lost a friend in the World Trade Center, has a mission to "entertain by making people think". On the stage, this results in an uneasy mix of kitchen-sink melodrama and liberal ranting.

John is so ineffectual as to be unconvincing. This is the point, we realise. But the corny lines that David comes out with while flirting with Maggy's daughter, Rebekah, do tend to grate.

It is still an engaging piece of work. The twist at the end, where the human and political conflicts meet, refocuses our attention sharply on a stirring theme: the questionable morality of violent direct action. In a London that has just had its first dirty bomb drills on the underground, Camarilla will, rightly, have people talking.