Written and directed by Matthew Wilkinson, this is an extremely powerful play about justice, revenge and forgiveness. It is said to be “inspired by real events” but what matters is less its documentary veracity than Wilkinson’s uncanny ability to get inside the skin of a man tormented by grief.
As the play unfolds, we gradually piece together the key facts. Nikolai Koslov is an Ossetian architect whose wife and children have been killed in a collision between two planes while en route to joining him in Nice. Koslov is convinced that an air-traffic controller, Thomas Olsen, is responsible for the crash and, when Olsen is publicly absolved, decides to take the law into his own hands.
I’d have liked to hear more about the risks to safety resulting from the privatisation of a public service and about corporate negligence. But Wilkinson makes us understand how Koslov, driven by ambition into accepting a foreign commission from a Russian oligarch, transfers his own sense of guilt into an unassuageable detestation of the man he blames for his family’s death. It’s a measure of the play’s success that abstract questions about vengeance and mercy are given a concrete application and make us wonder how we would have behaved in similar circumstances.
It helps that the piece is performed, in Wilkinson’s minimalist staging, by two first-rate actors. Cal MacAninch, who recently played Hamlet at the Glasgow Citizens, shows Koslov to be a man similarly hovering on the border of insanity; while Thusitha Jayasundera plays all the other characters with supreme technical finesse. Wilkinson’s play provides no easy answers but poses a series of compelling questions about the nature of moral responsibility.
• At the Finborough theatre until 19 September. Box office: 0844 847 1652
