Tribunals at the Tricycle
Nicolas Kent in conversation with Terry Stoller
Led by artistic director Nicolas Kent,
the Tricycle Theatre, in Kilburn, north London, has been at the
forefront of documentary theatre, examining subjects from war
crimes and human-rights violations to institutional racism. Since
1994, Kent has broadened the Tricycle's rich repertoire of socially
conscious plays to include stagings of edited government inquiries,
which are generally not televised in England. The tribunal plays
have established the Tricycle as an important outpost of political
theatre in Britain.
The Colour of Justice
(1999), which Kent considers his most successful venture,
is taken from an inquiry into police mishandling of an investigation
of the murder of a young black Londoner, Stephen Lawrence. The
Scott Inquiry into arms for Iraq was the focus of Half
the Picture (1994), and war-crimes trials were under
examination in Nuremberg (1996) and
Srebrenica (1996). The Hutton Inquiry--launched
after the suicide of Dr. David Kelly, a source for the BBC's report
that the government had "sexed up" its reasons for going to war
in Iraq--became Justifying War, the
Tricycle's fall 2003 production. And in spring 2004, the Tricycle
launched its own investigation to produce a verbatim play on the
plight of the British detainees at Guantánamo Bay. That play,
Guantánamo: 'Honor Bound to Defend Freedom,'
transferred to the West End after a run at the Tricycle, was
remounted in New York City and is scheduled for productions in
California, Italy, New Zealand, and Sweden. In April 2005, the
Tricycle will premiere Bloody Sunday: Scenes from
the Saville Inquiry, taken from the investigation
into the 1972 shooting of civil-rights marchers by British soldiers
in Ireland.
I spoke with Nicolas Kent in January
2005 in London. Interestingly, that was the week the British government
announced the release of four British citizens who had been held
for some three years at Guantánamo Bay. One of these citizens
is a central character in Guantánamo.
Terry Stoller: In articles
about the Tricycle Theatre and the tribunal plays, it's been implied
that this theatrical form is more relevant than journalism. Do
you think that's true?
Nicolas Kent: I don't
know if it's necessarily more relevant. I think what it does is
it gets a different perspective. The problem with journalism is,
because of the television age we're in and even newspapers, we're
getting sound bites. We get very short coverage of stories. You
read an article in a newspaper, and it lasts two to three minutes,
four minutes to read it. On television you see it in one minute,
and people don't grapple with issues. They don't get to the bottom
of issues. In the theatre you've got a captive audience. The house
lights go down. The doors are closed, and people stay in there
and they wrestle with something for an hour and a half. I think
also the group reaction to things is very important. Your anger
or your cynicism or your praise or admiration for something is
confirmed by the other members of the audience, whereas if you
read something alone in a room, that isn't quite so. It can deal
with [an issue] in much more depth too. If you're taking a public
inquiry, which is what we mainly do, [it lasts] maybe one month,
maybe six months, maybe nine months, or in the case of Bloody
Sunday, four years, and you can't get an overview of it.
You read little bits in the newspaper and then you get bored and
you come back to it and you revisit it. So to get an overview
of an issue, I think the theatre can be incredibly useful.
TS: This question doesn't
have as much to do with the tribunal plays, as with Guantánamo
['Honor Bound to Defend Freedom']. When you take on the role
of a theatre journalist, do you think you can be held to the same
standards we assume that other journalists adhere to?
NK: I think it's vital.
TS: How do you do that
with people who perhaps are not trained in journalism?
NK: I think you only do
it within certain rules, which are your own morality really. You
don't distort anything anyone's told you. You're very careful
about upholding the truth of what they've said. And if you're
given a source, you don't betray the source. If someone says I
don't want you to broadcast this or I don't want you to say this,
you certainly don't say it. So I think the ethics are exactly
the same. Journalistic ethics are common sense.
TS: Beyond the ethics,
what about needing two or three sources in order to say, "This
is fact." How do you think that might work in the theatre?
NK: I've never done plays
that do that because I'm always using what people have said. So
the source is them. I've never yet done a play where I've made
an allegation and it's me making the allegation. It's always other
people making the allegation, whom I report accurately, who don't
remain anonymous. So in Guantánamo, the fact Jamal al-Harith
says, "We were tortured," I don't have to question that. He said
that. So you can take it and believe it or disbelieve it. It's
up to you as an audience to do that.
TS: Let's say you represent
a person, and you know certain things about that person, and you
suppress that information to make a dramatic point.
NK:
Ah, yes. I suppose to some degree you might do that. If you'd
played the words like [one person represented in Guantánamo]
did to us, then he might come across as a less persuasive person.
So I suppose to some extent--in order to allow the words to speak
for themselves rather than the way he's put over them--we've stripped
him back a bit. But I don't see that as a distortion. I suppose
it's a distortion if he were on trial because the jury would be
looking at his body language as well as what he says. And so we've
changed the body language very slightly. But we've not changed
what he said. You know, some people can be very innocent in something
and give the impression of being guilty because they're foreign
to us. If he were an English person and he'd said these things
in the same way, then I might have been a little more careful
in trying to portray [him].
TS: Richard Norton-Taylor
[Kent's collaborator on most of the tribunal plays] has quoted
David Hare as saying, I work like an artist, not a journalist.
I'm wondering what you think about that because you're making
art out of journalism.
NK: David works differently.
Did you see Stuff Happens?
TS: I didn't. I did see
The Permanent Way.
NK: Let's take The
Permanent Way. The Permanent Way was not verbatim
theatre in that David made twenty-five percent of that up, and
I think it was very difficult to distinguish what were David's
words and what were the actual words spoken. I had some difficulty
with that play for that reason. And I don't know if I really respect
what he's saying there. Obviously he's bringing a theatrical consciousness,
and you can say that's artistry to some degree. It's artistry,
yes. But on the whole, either you're doing journalism in the theatre
or you're doing make-believe in the theatre. And I think it's
a rather uncomfortable straddling of the two. I don't want to
go to a play and not be certain if it's true, exact words. We
made one line up in the whole of Guantánamo, which was
really just to introduce the character. When the Foreign Secretary
came on, we said the Foreign Secretary will not be taking questions
after this statement. Well, the Foreign Secretary didn't take
questions after the statement, and it's not unreasonable to suppose
an official might have said that. I don't know whether an official
did say that. But it was the only line made up in the entire play.
And it was done for a reason, and when we print the plays, I don't
know if that one was, but all the other plays we printed, if we
made up anything, we've always put in square brackets. And we've
only made things up for clarity.
TS: Your theatre has
been called the most valuable home of political theatre. Do you
think there's something unique about the theatre, where it is,
who goes there, that makes it a place to do political work?
NK: It seems extraordinary
that we are called the most important theatre in Britain, political
theatre. Everyone keeps repeating it. I think it just shows the
paucity of political theatre in Britain. I find it a bit of an
overbearing title, to be absolutely honest. What happened is that
I had a predecessor who first set up the theatre, and he had four
planks of policy, which was to do new work, work that reflected
the ethnic minorities in the area, work for, by and with women,
and work for and with children.
TS: You still have that
listed on your website.
NK: And those are still
the mission statement effectively. And what happened is that I
suppose inevitably our two biggest communities are the Irish community
and the black community--also to some degree the Asian. When I
took over, those two communities were at war. And we had a cold
war going on, but we also had a hot war going on in South Africa
and in Northern Ireland. And that affected very much the communities
in Kilburn. [The black community] was affected by the racism of
the British government. Margaret Thatcher didn't come out anywhere
near strongly enough against apartheid. It was a major issue in
this country, because it was an ex-colony of ours and we were
responsible. So we had a very strong relationship with the Market
Theatre in Johannesburg, and we took in lots of South African
work. Equally if you were Irish, you had the situation that bombs
were going off all over London in regular intervals. You could
hardly take a tube journey anywhere and know that you'd ever get
to your destination without being stopped or disrupted because
of a bomb threat.
TS: What year was this?
NK: This was in the '80s.
The terrorism thing was going on, so inevitably we were doing
plays about Ireland too. So when both situations almost at the
same time got solved and the Berlin Wall came down--so the polemics
between communism and capitalism disappeared, and it all became
about how you managed an economy and not the political ideology
of all that--we sort of lost a role. Ironically we were very political
in those days, but we weren't considered to be political because
we were just doing theatre. I was looking for something to do,
really, just to make it more interesting to direct plays. I didn't
want to just do one classic and one new play, and out of that
came the Scott Inquiry and that started a tradition of verbatim
theatre which had actually been done in the '60s and '70s by John
McGrath, the 7:84 theatre company, and even by David Hare with
Fanshen. So I wasn't doing anything spectacularly new,
but it seems like I reinvented the wheel, and I think I've got
absolutely false credit for it. I'm not totally displeased everyone
thinks it's so wonderful, but it is a bit extraordinary in a way
because I don't think we've done anything totally different. Perhaps
the one thing we have done is we've been not polemical. What we're
doing is saying, "Here are the facts as we see them. You make
up your mind." But by the mere fact we've chosen the issue we've
chosen, we've actually made up our mind. You know, I wouldn't
have done the Scott Inquiry if I didn't believe the British government
was exporting arms to Iraq and shouldn't have been doing so. I
wouldn't have done the Hutton Inquiry if I didn't believe the
dossier for going to war in Iraq had been made up.
TS: Is the Kilburn community
interested in the documentary work? I know you get a lot of people
from the greater London area when you do those plays.
NK: I think so. I think
the community are very interested. It's very difficult to know.
We have a lot of the journalistic intelligentsia who come and
see the stuff, who are local to us, but we also have a lot of
very poor people. And when we do the Bloody Sunday inquiry, which
I'm working on at the moment, there will be a lot of working-class
Irish people coming to see that.
TS: Is that why you're
doing that piece, because of the Irish community?
NK: Well, I suppose that's
a little bit of the thinking. What happened was after the success
of the Stephen Lawrence [Colour of Justice], it seemed
quite natural and there was this appetite. Bloody Sunday does
figure quite large in the British psyche. It's a major, major
thing--troops opened up fire, killed 13 people. That's a lot of
people to kill. So we decided to do it. It was quite obvious we
were accredited, and quite a few people were interested in us
doing it. That was six years ago, and we didn't expect Hutton
to happen and we didn't expect Guantánamo to happen. And those
things have supplanted it. So I've been working on it for six
years.
TS: When was the inquiry?
NK: The inquiry finished
on November 22, [2004]. And it hasn't reported. We always do this
before the report. It will report probably in June, July, August
of this year [2005].
TS: You often have post-show
discussions. Do you think that this is an intrinsic part of this
type of theatre? And what do you think happens when there isn't
one?
NK: It's quite interesting,
that question, because I'm wrestling with it at the moment, because
Bloody Sunday is likely to be very long. It's likely
to be about three hours with interval, so it doesn't give us a
room for post-show discussion. And I was thinking, What are we
going to talk about with Bloody Sunday? There aren't
really any issues in Bloody Sunday. It spills over into
the Iraq War in a strange way about how an army of occupation
works. But there are not that many issues. With Nuremberg,
I think we hardly had any post-show discussions. It just didn't
seem necessary. But then when we did Srebrenica, we had
endless post-show discussions because it was about where we moved
on in ex-Yugoslavia. So I think it's whether the issue is a live
issue and can be altered by people's behavior. And with the Lawrence,
it certainly could be altered, and so the discussions were invaluable.
You know the Evening Standard? Well, one of the post-show
discussions made the main headline on the front page of the Evening
Standard, because there was a bit of a row at it. Someone
had attacked the Lawrence family. It was: "Lawrence family in
onstage dispute," huge banner headline which was selling the newspaper.
TS:
Some critics complain about the bias in documentary works. Do
you have a problem with a documentary piece taking a point of
view?
NK: No, I don't. As long
as it honestly purveys its point of view. We don't have a point
of view, except as I said, by putting it on. Then people say you're
preaching to the converted or, as you say in the States, preaching
to the choir. I don't have a problem with preaching to the choir.
Max Stafford-Clark, who did Permanent Way, came to see
Guantánamo, and someone said it's all preaching to the
converted. And I overheard Max say, "Yeah, but I just love theatre
that preaches to the converted." Theatre that preaches to the
converted, or is accused of it, has, it seems to me, three major
defenses: one, it strengthens those who are converted into their
view to do something about the project; two, it quite often attracts
someone who is slightly wavering and doesn't quite know about
the problem but is vaguely interested in it in some way or other--it
strengthens their commitment to the project; and three, it quite
often gets someone in for completely spurious reasons, in that
they might have an aunt who has a second nephew who's in the show
or they might have thought Guantánamo was a wonderful
Cuban musical that they'd always wanted to see, and they've learnt
something. So in the end it doesn't matter very much whether it
preaches to the converted. What matters is whether it's full or
not full, whether people come.
TS: When I was reading
the English reviews for Guantánamo, I couldn't really
see in the critical response a rightist or a leftist point of
view.
NK: It's very interesting
because in the States we did get partisan reviews. There was no
question the New York Times was going to write us a good
review. I knew that before we ever started because we were a good
thing in their argument against the Bush regime, so we already
knew we were going to get half-a-page photo on the front cover.
The Wall Street Journal completely rubbished us. I mean
completely: It was polemical. It was left-wing bias. It wasn't
accurate. All those things. And you just thought, that's The Wall
Street Journal. There was an ax to grind there. So I was quite
interested that the reviewing was enormously political in the
States and [in England] it was completely objective, it seemed
to me.
TS: In terms of having
a real political effect, do you think the play Guantánamo,
for stirring up interest and getting more people passionate about
the issue, is connected with the releases from Guantánamo Bay
of the British detainees this week?
NK: It's a little bit--I
think the government [was] surprised at the tenacity of the British
public to plead for four Muslim "terrorists," in inverted commas,
or eight Muslim "terrorists" at the time, and they've been really
surprised by that. I think they got very surprised that the play
goes on in a little theatre in northwest London, which they don't
bother about but has then extraordinary reviews. And then suddenly
it's gone into the West End, and Tony Blair is asked and interviewed
if he's going to go and see it. How does a play go to West End?
It doesn't go to West End because no one wants to see it. So [the
government officials] put two and two together. And then the families
are slightly more robust. There's someone called Kathleen Mubanga,
who's Martin Mubanga's sister, who's been campaigning for Martin,
who didn't give a single press interview, wouldn't cooperate with
us on the play, came to see the play four times, found it intensely
moving, has been in touch a lot and suddenly started coming on
demonstrations and suddenly starting giving interviews to the
press. Well, all that helps. So, yeah, I think the whole issue
was on the tipping point, and the play may have been one hair
which just made the scales drop. I don't think it did much more
than that. With the Stephen Lawrence, the play had an absolutely
devastating and huge effect. It's still used to train police officers.
They use the videotape [of the play] as police training. And when
the play went out on television, it was viewed by twenty-three
percent of the national viewing audience on a Sunday night between
10 o'clock and 12 o'clock. That's a huge audience who stuck with
that play. It was quite a difficult play to digest.
TS: Some people talk about
documentary plays, oral-history plays, as being healing. Do you
see them that way?
NK: I think they're all
deeply healing. Healing in the sense of [Desmond] Tutu talking
about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa,
which said it was doing not a retributive justice but a restorative
justice. And I think that what public inquiries are there to do,
they're trying to look at what happened to a victim, be it David
Kelly or Stephen Lawrence or a businessman who was put out of
work because of the arms to Iraq scandal who later went to jail.
These are public inquiries to restore the British public's faith
in the law and the conduct of government. If you then take them
to a wider public, that really forces the healing process. [Guantánamo]
isn't a public inquiry, but it is a sort of inquiry. A lot of
Muslims came to see Guantánamo and the discussions we
did have. It's extraordinary. I've sat amongst a mainly non-Muslim
audience and I saw people care about Muslims. With [Colour
of Justice], there was a lot of expression of people who
suffered racial attack, physical attack. A lot of people started
talking about it and coming out of the woodwork.
TS: Do you think documentary
theatre is the right form for the contemporary world, because
of the way we live our lives now?
NK: I do think it is,
probably. Because what's happened now is politics have become
so complex and so difficult that the only way of dealing with
things is on single issues. People are very focused on single
issues, and the theatre can treat single issues, as can film,
very well and very effectively.
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