At the start of her autobiographical three-hander, writer-performer Annie Lareau claims that news reports of atrocities focus on the wrong thing. She says they are always about nations and leaders and never about the people directly affected.
Fuselage shows that there is a good reason for this: human interest stories (of which there are a lot) tend to tell you only that people get sad when sad things happen. Just like this play.
Imagine if there had been an episode of the TV series Fame in which the writers had decided to get serious. As well as following a group of drama students in their quest for stardom, they would include a global terror incident. The downing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, for example.
This is the setup for Fuselage. It is a routine story of student life – classes, crushes and clashes – brought to a halt by the bombing of the plane on 21 December 1988. Had Lareau been able to afford to change her ticket, she would have joined 35 classmates from Syracuse University on the fated flight.
Where previous Lockerbie dramas, such as Des Dillon’s Lockerbie 103 and David Benson’s Lockerbie: Unfinished Business, have found their anger in causes and cover-ups, this one talks nebulously of “terrorists” and presents the death of Lareau’s fellow students, including her best friend Theodora Cohen, not as a matter of wider public concern but as a personal outrage. It is astonishingly devoid of politics.
Lareau suffered a devastating loss and the emotional toll must have been unbearable, but the play’s lack of context, barring some scene-setting clips, turns a globally significant attack into something small and private. Makaela Milburn’s production, also starring Peter Dylan O’Connor and Brenda Joyner, manipulates the audience into empathetic sobs and changes nothing.
At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 25 August
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