Bloody Sunday: Scenes from the Saville Inquiry

Synopsis

On Sunday 30 January 1972, 13 civil rights marchers were shot dead and another 13 wounded when British soldiers opened fire during an anti-internment civil rights march in Derry, Northern Ireland. The initial 1972 inquiry by Lord Chief Justice, Lord Widgery - branded the Widgery Whitewash by many - suggested that the soldiers had been fired on first. After a sustained campaign by the families of the victims and in the light of new material collected by the Irish Government, a new Inquiry was set up in 1998 as part of the Northern Ireland Peace Process. Since March 2000, the Saville Inquiry has heard evidence from over one thousand witnesses, but thanks to the brilliant compression of the editing, we are presented with a breathtaking, dramatic overview, moving swiftly from painful eyewitness accounts of how people died, to the cross examination of the soldiers who fired. Richard Norton-Taylor's achievement in taking this story into the public domain where it belongs is outstanding and of critical importance.

Our Review:

12 April 2005

Over the last decade, the Tricycle has forged a remarkable series of dramatic documentary plays that put the public into "public enquiries" by re-staging them as powerful theatrical events. Though staged with all the trimmings of a modern conference or courtroom - complete with plasma screens on the stage and around the auditorium to display key documents of evidence electronically - the process returns the theatre to its earliest origins: as a debating forum in which to play out matters of major public importance.

While even now the RSC's production of the Greek tragedy Hecuba is offering a portrait of the brutal aftermath of a war from 2,500 years ago, here we are confronted with a war on our more immediate doorsteps, and the reverberations that are still being felt of a cataclysmic event from over 32 years ago that became known as Bloody Sunday.

That is also the title of the Tricycle's latest "tribunal" play, as the series have become known, w...

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Latest User Review

217.33.166.212) - 8 April 2005:

An outstanding and engaging evening - compelling in the extreme - must see.......

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