There’s a sharp, questing intelligence at work in this jagged 75-minute drama, yet dramatically it feels unfinished. Written by a former journalist, Adam Brace, whose Stovepipe attracted attention this year, it’s an acidic examination of post-colonialism and slippery personal and political morality. Its brevity means that characters and themes are underdeveloped, but in Jamie Harper’s production it also gives the piece a compelling, terse velocity.
In an unnamed Central Asian country, three writers, wide-eyed and armed only with their naive assumptions, arrive to run British Council workshops. Refusing an invitation to a tame bash at the embassy, they go to watch an execution ordered by a local warlord at a British-owned uranium mine. As embassy staff attempt to prevent calamity and the mine’s owner refuses to call on his dubious business associations to intervene, the values and humanity of all concerned, and of the regimes they represent, are called into question.
Obfuscation and hypocrisy permeate almost every action. The paternalism of the writers’ educative mission is offset by the ghoulish enthusiasm of two of them for bloody spectacle, and by the capitulation of their reluctant companion. The mine-owner, who, tellingly, is blind, is content to turn away when atrocities are committed on his land, or to pass them off as endemic in local “culture”. The embassy is embroiled in a stew of sexual betrayal, disillusionment, corruption and incompetence that dilutes the best, if politically compromised, efforts of the beleaguered ambassador.
There are echoes of the case of Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan who was expelled for exposing the human rights abuses, and who left his wife for a Tashkent nightclub dancer. And Brace neatly marries the ambiguities of foreign policy to individual attitudes: the expats simultaneously ring-fence their lives from their environment, while claiming an enthusiasm for the country and its people as they exploit them.
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Three actors — Daniel McGowan, Benjamin Peters and Tiffany Wood — play all nine characters, and the play vaults back and forth in time over four short scenes. The effect is gripping, but spare to the point of being undernourished. If it needs more meat on its bones, though, Brace’s play is still a piquant mouthful.
Box office: 020-7503 1646, to Dec 19