Bloody Sunday

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, which sees Guardian journalist Richard Norton-Taylor (who also worked on four of the Tricycle’s six previous such
plays) editing and shaping the proceedings of the Saville Inquiry into a compelling narrative.

The Inquiry was set up in 1998 by Prime Minister Tony Blair to investigate the events of 30 January, 1972, when in Blair’s words, “during a disturbance in Londonderry following a civil rights march, shots were fired by the British army. 13 people were killed and another 13 were wounded, one of whom subsequently died.”

Those are the undisputed facts; an earlier public enquiry from Lord Widgery, produced in 1972 within just 11 weeks of the fateful day, had laid blame squarely at the organisers’ feet – “there would have been no deaths in Londonderry on 30 January if those who organised the illegal march had not thereby created a highly dangerous situation in which a clash between demonstrators and the security forces was almost inevitable”. It also suggested “a strong suspicion” that some of the deceased or wounded “had been firing weapons or handling bombs in the course of the afternoon and that yet others had been closely supporting them.”

But during the years that followed the families of the victims fought tirelessly to have the case re-opened, and in particular that last allegation put aside. And there have been many, many more victims of violence in the area: over 3,000 people – civilians, soldiers, police and prison officers – have lost their lives since.

The Saville Inquiry is an attempt to make sense, at least, of the earlier bloodshed. And the Tricycle’s latest show is an admirable attempt to make sense of the Saville Inquiry (though the tribunal is yet to submit its report to the government). In the process, the 434 days that the inquiry sat for across some four and a half years – and in which approximately 16 million words of oral evidence were heard and transcribed – are condensed into just two and half hours worth of theatre.

While a total of 921 witnesses were called, here we hear the evidence of just 12: it’s a necessarily selective process that can only give a partial picture. But as staged by the Tricycle’s artistic director Nicolas Kent (with Charlotte Westenra), it has a gripping intensity that makes the audience directly confront a painful and difficult story. And a large ensemble cast inhabit it so naturally that their work barely seems like acting at all.

– Mark Shenton