It's always fascinating to see famous writers' early work.
But the real value of this 100-minute, 1972 radio play by Caryl Churchill,
which draws heavily on Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, lies not so
much in what it reveals about Churchill as what it says about its all too
topical subject: the devastating impact of torture on practitioners as well as
victims.
Fanon, who appears as a largely silent witness, was head of
the psychiatric unit in an Algerian hospital. In the play, we see him listening
to a series of patients shortly before he quit his post in 1956 to work with
the FLN (National Liberation Front) in their fight against French colonialism.
In the play's longest encounter, we see a badly rattled French
"administrator", who clearly practises torture, and his wife, trying
to have their disturbed daughter, Françoise, classified as insane. Other
patients include a French policeman who vents his rage at those he interrogates
on his own family, and a couple of indigenous Algerians – one a death-haunted
guerrilla, the other a frenzied patriot constantly accused of cowardice.
The play offers clues to later Churchill work: the teenage
Françoise, whose catatonia is partially caused by hearing the cries of tortured
victims in the parental home, foreshadows the terrified little girl who sees
her uncle beating "traitors" in Churchill's apocalyptic 2000 play,
Far Away. But the main interest lies in Fanon's unforgiving exploration of
colonialism. The French administrator lives in a cloud of self-deception,
believing in the beneficial impact of Racine and Proust on the local
population. The policeman argues in all seriousness that, "It's no joke
torturing someone for 10 hours."
But while the director, Jim Russell, is to be congratulated
for unearthing an important play, his production is both undercooked and
static: its one concession to theatricality is the grim image of a life-size
puppet symbolising the victims of colonialism. Ruth Pickett as the sectioned
Françoise, Ruth Lass as her overbearing mother, Simon Yadoo as the
disintegrating cop and Miles Mitchell as the patient Fanon all give decent
enough performances. But, in the light of all we've learned about Iraq and Afghanistan,
the play suddenly seems appallingly relevant.
