The tragic events of Thursday lend Robin Soans’ latest play about terrorists an uncanny significance, writes Tom Foot

ROBIN Soans frowns and says: “If Martians were looking down on the Earth they would say we had the intelligence of a lobotomised dormouse.”
He is not a religious man. But after last week’s terrorist attack he thinks he may believe in fate.
Thursday’s atrocities lent the London premiere of his critically-acclaimed play Talking to Terrorists an uncanny significance.
His other play, The Arab-Israeli Cookbook – which opens at the Tricycle Theatre this week – has also been furnished with a judicious relevance.
Talking to Terrorists, which ends its national run at the Royal Court Theatre on July 30, is a compilation of accounts from global “terrorists” as well as army generals, politicians and the innocent victims.
The Arab-Israeli Cookbook looks at how normal people struggled to get on with their lives in 2003 during the Palestinian intifada.
Both plays adopt the verbatim style – the new cutting edge of contemporary political theatre.
The scripts are taken word for word from interviews conducted by Soans around the world.
But now his subject matter has come crashing onto his doorstep.
As Soans watched Thursday’s news from his Queen’s Park house, he was reminded of Gandhi’s insight, paraphrasing Jesus – “an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind”.
Soans seeks to open people’s eyes, but does he believe the theatre can begin to offer a practical solution?
“Enlightenment is the only solution,” he says.
“After 9/11 I thought the world would just step back and take a look at what’s happening. But the Americans did exactly the opposite – they went to war.
“I just feel a terrible sadness for the state of humanity,” says the playwright.
“We have so many natural disasters I cannot understand why we choose to inflict damage on ourselves. The sad thing is that Thursday was absolutely inevitable – it was just a question of when.”
Soans is clearly political, you can almost feel the blood boiling in his veins when he talks but he is apprehensive about extremism.
“I would describe myself as a left-wing humanitarian. But I can’t accept the extremists,” he says.
Soans’ contempt for the imposure of ideas is the driving force behind his work.
“What I find most distressing is when people’s lives are ruined for the sake of an idea,” he continued. “I was touched by what Tony Benn said on that evening – that all the violence is essentially ideological and not born out of religion, as many of us think.
“In Terrorists we have Norman Tebbitt’s life being turned completely upside down after the Brighton bomb. I wanted to show how terrible it is when people’s lives are destroyed just because someone thinks differently to another.”
And this point must be all the more apparent to the playwright after last week’s explosions.
On Thursday, London’s theatres closed and his shows were no exception. But the bombings affected his production in personal terms as well.
The wife of one of the actors from the Arab-Israeli Cookbook was evacuated from the Russell Square Tube and he has withdrawn from the play due to shock. He says “The Royal Court have been fantastic up to now – I’m sure it doesn’t look great for them to have Talking to Terrorists written in large red letters outside their theatre. But I think they understand the importance of the work at this time.”
The controversy surrounding his work centres on his belief that we are not that different from the killers themselves.
Soans believes we would all turn into militants had we been nurtured in some of the violent societies he has studied like Uganda, Palestine, eastern Turkey, Ireland and Uganda.
He says “One of the most contentious points of the play is the idea that we would act the same were we in their situation.
“If you were blocked and cramped and squeezed at vital points in life, if you woke up to violence, bullets flying past your family and your dog – or stopped at roadblocks fearing for your life you would decide to do something about it. We are not that different from them.
“Take the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan (PKK). The Turkish government took all funding from a Kurdish village and the schools and community centres went bust. And of course all the bright kids began to band together, finding strength in numbers. There is an inevitability about it. It would not be long before we all turned militant.”
He continues: “I do find some of the people I’ve interviewed charismatic – especially those who survived against impossible odds. Some of these guys should have been dead 1,000 times over. One man was shot nine times in his anorak and dodged each bullet. You can be tempted to give them heroic status.
“That’s why we put in the innocents’ side of the story – as a corrective.”
But while the plays are balanced, they clearly have an agenda.
Soans’ simple case for enlightenment – that talking is more constructive than bombing – surfaces and resurfaces throughout his plays.
In Talking to Terrorists, a member of the Ulster Volunteer Force plucks up the courage to talk to an IRA volunteer. He makes him a cup of tea and a friendship is born.
This may sound utopian but everything in Soans’ script was said and done. There are horror stories, like the Ugandan girl supervising torture at the age of 13. But the plays are also punctuated with moments of hope and direction. It is refreshing to see progressive theory in practice.
Some will find Soans’ compassion for terrorists controversial and some will applaud his progressive approach to an increasingly hopeless situation but all will agree that a measured probe into the psychology of terror is absolutely essential.

• Talking to Terrorist is at the Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square. 020 7565 5000. Until July 30.
The Arab-Israeli Cookbook runs at the Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn, NW6, until August 6. 020 7328 1000.