Talking to Terrorists

by Robin Soans

“I looked around the room and I thought, I’m the only person in this room that hasn’t killed anyone.” Talking to Terrorists is a play commissioned by the Royal Court and out of Joint. The writer, director Max Stafford-Clark, and actors interviewed people from around the world who have been involved in terrorism. They wanted to know what makes ordinary people do extreme things.

Genres: Plays, Theatre, Drama

96 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2006

Reviews

[Eva · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this play could be really great when performed, but the text alone was absurdly confusing to me (but maybe that's also because I have have barely enough mental capacity left for anything atm 🤠🥴)

[Kārlis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although this collection of stories about terrorism is large and confusing, certain themes have been tried to be drawn out, and I can sense that the play itself would be much more powerful and hard-hitting than the play text because of the nature of verbatim theatre and how emotional hearing real accounts is in comparison to just reading them. I think I enjoyed the epilogue the most: reading about what verbatim theatre means to different authors and how much they support it is a very enlightening experience.

[Felicity Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well done. The whole time I was very confused about where this was heading, while it talked about many things that have happened that are worth discussing I was struggling to see the overall purpose or moral of the play. However having finished it, it struck gold with what it was trying to say. This is some play.

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I particularly liked about this play is that it took a broad view of terrorism; rather than simply identifying all terrorists as Islamic fundamentalists, this play draws from Irish terrorists (both loyalists and republicans), as well as several different African and Middle Eastern terrorists. Of course, the British are much more cognizant of the multicultural/multinational face of terrorism than many Americans are because the IRA and other Northern Irish terrorist groups operated in Britain for decades.

I find documentary theatre problematic, however, because so much of it is exposition which is difficult to perform because there isn't much action.