The Scotsman  
Diane Dubois

Dissent into Terror
Do you know any smug left-leaning intellectuals who love telling you what makes the world tick? Send them to see Van Badham's new play - before it's too late.
4 August 2003

The horrors of 9/11 and its aftermath forced Generation Y to put down the drugs, the Tarantino videos and books on serial killers, and return to some serious grown-up thinking about big, important issues such as world politics. Concurrently, in-your-face theatre came of age. At least that would appear to be the case if this mature, serious play by young writer Van Badham is anything to go by.

In London in the here and now a bomb has just gone off. No-one knows the identity of the terrorists, but everyone is reeling from the shock and sheer horror of what has happened. Caught up in the legacy of the explosion is a radical academic of the old school, a dissenting type who nearly lost her twenty-something daughter to the blast. She and her husband, staunch supporters of everyone from the Sandinistas to the IRA, believed that dissent is never a crime. When terrorists come close to killing their child, they are prone to some serious rethinking.

Much new writing has recently been preoccupied with putting gangsters, junkies and other so-called underclasses on the stage. Here, it is startling to see a middle-class family of academic jet-setting cosmopolitan sophisticates at the centre of attention. However, their glamorous world of intense political debate hides dark secrets and conflicts. Massively complex political themes are encoded in this dense, cerebral drama, but it never tips over into obvious allegory. It slowly ticks away like a time bomb before events come to a terrible, shocking yet somehow inevitable end. The play explores difficult issues with subtlety, and asks serious questions about the next generation of radicals.

Badham's play asks how any of us can remain rational when the devastation is suddenly so close to home. It evokes the feelings that many of us had after the attack on the Twin Towers. Echoes of questions asked at the time permeate the dialogue: "Can we take anything for granted?" and "Did I make you do this?"

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