In the past few years, the Tricycle Theatre has been pioneering
the use of verbatim evidence as contemporary theatre. The same production
company and the same director gave us the life-changing Guantanemo last year,
and previous Tricycle productions have included the Scott Enquiry into arms in to Iraq, the
UN Tribunal into Srebrenica, the Stephen Lawrence Enquiry and the Hutton
Enquiry. Bloody Sunday is both further away and nearer to home than most
of these.
Trying to recall Bloody Sunday is a little embarrassing, as under Matthew's inevitably ruthless questioning I can remember little from the time, apart from it being the seminal moment when you had to chose sides. Like all good lefties, I instinctively believed the Republican version just as the Establishment believed the Army's official line. Only now, after 7 years and 30 million words of the Saville enquiry, is the establishment line starting to crumble. Those that felt it impossible that the British army would open fire on unarmed British civilians are only now starting the accept the possibility that they could have been wrong.
Clearly this is a very short edit of events, and the editor holds
the power. And Richard Norton Taylor is not of the Establishment bent. The
army hierarchy sound vague, pusillanimous and even downright ludicrous at times,
while the individual solder who admitted he said 'what the RMP wanted' had the
sound of honesty. 13 unarmed civilians died in Londonderry that day, and
12 more were injured when a civil rights demonstration dissolved into chaos and
the army opened fire. The official line has always been that those fired
upon were holding weapons or were involved in bomb-throwing. There is no
evidence that was the case.
As if the two and a half hours of evidence was not enough, the best value programme I have ever bought includes another dozen pages of evidence - form Martin McGuiness to other soldiers, maps, photographs and copies of photographs and the crucial army log. The enquiry is not due to report until the end of the year, or later and it will be interesting to see the comments on some of the characters portrayed here, notably General Sir Robert Ford (whom Matthew thought was played as a parody, but I'm not so sure) and Colonel Derek Wilford (leader of first Para and 'a nutter' by Matthew's account). Soldier S was a believable liar, soldier F an unbelievable one while Reg Tester was the voice of the Official IRA; he knows what weapons were out there - he signed them in and out that very day!
It is very difficult to explain how this is drama, but it certainly was. The high-tech court scene was an electronic stage of masterful complexity and the very lack of visible emotion often moving. More to the point, the incredible detail of the accounts, on one aspect of this bitter day, draws you in till you start to feel you could have been there and you understood the feelings of those who were. And if nothing else, it means I shall follow the reports eventual release with vastly more interest than otherwise, and have much more idea what the those conclusions mean. I can only hope that like the other plays mentioned above, Bloody Sunday picks up a West end birth; and if it does, do yourselves a favour and get along to see it.