The Daily Telegraph

A date on Death Row
Charles Spencer reviews Terre Haute at the Trafalgar Studios
16 May 2007

One should always be chary of shows that arrive in London from the Edinburgh Festival trailing critical superlatives, especially when it has taken them nine months to make the journey. Edinburgh is so full of irredeemable junk that even barely detectable evidence of promise results in plays being praised to the skies.

Terre Haute, however, proves something special. Written by the distinguished American author and critic Edmund White, and featuring two of the most beautifully judged performances on the London stage, it holds its audience in an almost mesmeric grip.

The play is topical, transgressive and thrillingly dramatic, and deserves a longer run than this brief outing in a cramped studio.

White was inspired to write the piece by the correspondence Gore Vidal had with the Oklahoma bomber, Timothy McVeigh, before the latter was executed by lethal injection.

Vidal, that perennial American gadfly, argued that McVeigh - whose detonation of a vast home-made bomb in a federal building in 1995 left 168 dead - needed to be taken seriously.

He never met the mass murderer, however, and their correspondence has never been published, so this is essentially a work of the imagination.

White has changed the names of both terrorist and writer, and though many similarities with the real-life figures remain, he admits that he has made the bomber more scarily paranoid than the impassive McVeigh, while the writer now owes as much to White's own character as to Vidal's.

Initially, the play fascinates as a game of cat and mouse, in which it is never quite clear who is the cat and who the mouse. The terrorist, a former US soldier turned anti-federal survivalist, wants his story to be told.

The writer, meanwhile, is looking for a scoop at a time when his own inspiration and energy are flagging. In this relationship, just who is using whom?

But there is also something unexpectedly comic about the encounter, in which the fastidious values and vocabulary of the patrician author are contrasted with the redneck rage of the terrorist, who believes his mass murder is entirely justified.

"Your life is positively Aristotelian in its tragic purity," proclaims the author, to which the baffled prisoner responds: "Well, f*** you, too."

Where the play pushes daring to the brink of tastelessness, and miraculously pulls it off, is in the developing relationship between these mismatched men. It's clear that the author is becoming physically attracted to the prisoner, dressed in his orange overalls in a small screened-off cell.

And even the virginal, homophobic terrorist compares their encounter to a first date.

The play becomes, in part, a study of different kinds of loneliness and the human need for contact, resulting in an ending of exceptional poignancy.

That superb and undervalued actor Peter Eyre is outstanding as the acute, civilised author, who sees in the condemned man raw beauty, appalling waste, and a premonition of his own death.

Lofty, camp and precise, with a manner that ranges from elaborate irony through sudden anger to unexpected tenderness, this is a performance from the top drawer.

Newcomer Arthur Darvill, who graduated from RADA only last year, is also outstanding as the Oklahoma bomber, raw, sometimes furious, but somehow signalling a touching vulnerability beyond his ranting conspiracy theories and hatred of federal government.

Then, in the final moments of George Perrin's continually absorbing, 80-minute production, this brutal mass murderer suddenly discovers an entirely unexpected touch of grace.

The effect is electrifying.

Until June 2. Tickets: 0870 060 6632

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