Travelling to Common Wealth and Northern Stage’s new co-production about the arms trade, its consequences and techno music, I read in the paper that the UK is suspending arms exports to Turkey. It’s a (happy) surprise. As the mock arms-trade fair to which the audience is invited at the show’s blackly humorous opening makes clear, Britain’s weapon sales are not usually so easily interrupted.
Here, three main actors have, in different ways, paid the price of armament profits. In collaboration with Common Wealth and writer Hassan Mahamdallie, each has incorporated their personal experience of conflict into a wider, docu-fiction (that incorporates the seven-strong Byker community cast). While the material is promising, the production feels unrealised, stuck at workshop stage. It satisfies most when engaging individual stories. As when Shatha Altawai, a Yemeni artist (who joins the company via video link), swaps wedding songs with Mo’min Swaitat, an actor from Palestine, then tells of the Saudi bombs bringing death to a marriage feast. Or when Swaitat and Alexander Eley, a former soldier who served in Afghanistan, discover a shared love of techno music: a cross-cultural bond, a refuge from trauma and a form of resistance.
Under the joint direction of Evie Manning and Rhiannon White, the action weaves through Robbie Thomson’s sculptural design of movable steel towers, stacked with 72 mirrored metronomes - one for every Eurofighter jet sold by the UK to Saudi Arabia.
The company’s laudable aim is to encourage people to challenge the arms trade, but, as the promenading audience is manoeuvred around the community hall, I ponder the irony of trying to motivate individuals by treating them like sheep.
• I Have Met the Enemy (And the Enemy Is Us) is at Byker Community Centre, Newcastle upon Tyne, until 19 October
