Verbatim theatre has been the flavour of political theatre for the past two decades and no theatre has done more to promote this style of public witnessing than the Tricycle in Kilburn, north London. Its artistic director, Nicolas Kent, has created a special style of verbatim drama called tribunal theatre, where the results of long-running public inquiries or trials are edited into an evening’s viewing.
His latest venture, Tactical Questioning: Scenes from the Baha Mousa Inquiry, illustrates the pros and cons of this type of infotainment. First the facts: at the Haitham hotel in Basra, southern Iraq, Baha Mousa – a 26-year-old receptionist – and nine others were arrested on September 14, 2003 by the British Army as suspected insurgents. About 36 hours later, Mousa was dead. A post-mortem examination of his body showed that he had been asphyxiated and there were signs of 93 injuries. Five years later, a public inquiry was held into his death and the treatment of the other detainees.
Tactical Questioning is a compressed account of that inquiry. Gerard Elias QC, counsel to the inquiry, asks a series of soldiers and their superior officers what happened to the Iraqi men who were arrested in 2003.The answer is ghastly: they were held in squalid conditions, with no toilets; their clothing was torn off; they were hooded; then starved and dehydrated; made to adopt stress positions for hours on end; they were denied sleep; they were yelled at and repeatedly beaten up. Their injuries were stomach-turning.
Although these practices have been illegal in the British Army since they were abandoned in the early 1970s in the fight against the IRA, they were used extensively in Iraq. Worse than that, these forms of torture are given a sickening name: “Tactical Questioning”. The middle of the play is taken up by the testimony of Corporal Donald Payne, a repulsive bully who was accused by courts martial of inhumane treatment of prisoners and, unusually, found guilty. His words are evasive, unrepentant and his account of Mousa’s death almost unendurable.
But if Payne is vile, his superior officers are scarcely more impressive. Clearly, they knew about these dreadful practices, but did nothing. One of them uses the chilling words: “I followed orders”. Others, such as Major Michael Peebles, simply looked the other way.Nor are the politicians any better: Adam Ingram, the armed forces minister at the time, comes across as slimy, deliberately unhelpful and utterly unscrupulous. Only Lieutenant Colonel Nicholas Mercer, the army legal advisor, seems to have had any real concerns, and at least he acted on them.
Tactical Questioning does have its limitations. It is edited by Guardian journalist Richard Norton-Taylor, who makes a big deal about its truth. But, although this play is based on reality, it is pre-empting the actual report of the inquiry (due in the autumn). And this is a high-risk strategy. The last time that the Tricycle did this, with Justifying War, its play about the Hutton Inquiry, the play’s conclusions were completely at odds with those of the inquiry report.
The other limitations of tribunal theatre are political and aesthetic. You would have to be very naive to be shocked at the actions of these young soldiers. Visually, this is a play about a courtroom peopled by men in suits and furnished with bog-standard office equipment. More seriously, at the end of the evening, we know much more about army brutality than about Baha Mousa. There is no attempt to tell us who he was, or what he did in his short life. The production has a gaping hole at its centre.
