Credible Witness

Synopsis

A young man flees to a distant land and vanishes. His mother follows in pursuit, certain that she'll find him, but in the unfamiliar place, her certainties and confidence seem to crumble.

Our Review:

16 February 2001

Timberlake Wertenbaker's worthy but wordy and over-earnest new drama Credible Witness is highly topical. It goes behind the headlines to gather together a group of asylum seekers at a UK detention centre and observe their very different reasons for being there.

Petra Karagy, a Macedonian woman, is furiously searching for her long-lost son, Alexander, who disappeared to England three years earlier; Shivan Rajagopal is a Sri Lankan doctor; Aziz is in flight from civil war in Algeria; Ameena is a Somalian refugee who was brutally raped and tortured.

Marshalling their conflicting claims to the right to asylum is immigration officer Simon Le Britten (a name that is one of the play's many painstakingly obvious notes of symbolism), who has himself found a kind of asylum in this job after being made redundant from the Post Office, where he was a middle manager.

One's credulity is frequently stretched by this gathering and the clumsy conflicts t...

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Latest User Review

USER: Whatsonstage.com - 1 March 2001:

A very informative piece though not very theatrical. Would have been marvellous on the radio. Having said that, the performance I saw was translated into British Sign Language which made it accessible to deaf people in the audience who felt it deepened their understanding of the problems of asylum seekers better than anything they could read in the newspapers. ...

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