The Scotsman  
Joyce McMillan
17 August 2006

EDMUND White's Terre Haute, playing at the Assembly Rooms, is another play about dissidence against the current American way, although it brings together the most unlikely pair of political dissenters ever seen on stage. It is based on a real-life incident in which the leading American liberal writer Gore Vidal planned to visit Indiana to interview the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh on death row.

The real meeting never took place. But White, perhaps America's leading gay writer, imagines an encounter between two parallel fictional characters, both sceptical of the power and arrogance of American government, and both drenched in a certain sense of traditional American values; although one draws liberal conclusions while the other leans towards a kind of Nazism.

The show's problem is that instead of conducting a full-blooded exploration of McVeigh's motives, it keeps being distracted into a wistful exploration of the old man's attraction to the clean-cut, uncomplaining young killer. Either subject would have made a fine play, if White had kept it in focus; but meanwhile, both Peter Eyre as the elderly James Brevoord, and Arthur Darvill as the prisoner Harrison, give performances to relish, thoughtful, moving, and beautifully disciplined.

Read this article on The Scotsman website.