Jim Swire was not there to hold his daughter Flora's hand when she fell five miles out the sky. But for the past 22 years he has been holding Flora's hand very tightly, campaigning to get justice for her and the others who died when a bomb on Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. It is a campaign that has had to be fought not alongside successive British and US governments, but often in direct opposition to them.
Flora was a child who constantly questioned why things happened. In David Benson's one-man show – in which he plays the tweed-jacketed, calmly measured and bone-weary Swire – it soon becomes apparent that governments don't want to reveal what happened regarding Lockerbie. Fitting into the current theatrical vogue for the performance lecture, this piece may suffer from information overload, but it also has a compelling clarity. And after watching it, is hard not to find yourself agreeing with Swire that the real scandal is not that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of the bombing, was released from jail last year on compassionate grounds, but that he was ever imprisoned in the first place.
The real power of the play isn't in the way it pieces together the evidence, but in the evidence it presents of a father's love for a lost daughter. It could be even stronger if it offered more detail about the effect Swire's continuing fight has had on his remaining family, but it is nevertheless a stark reminder that for the families of the dead, Lockerbie will always be unfinished business.
