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.