If you met a genocidal dictator how would you react? For the Scottish academic who is granted an audience with Cambodia’s Pol Pot in Jack MacGregor’s play, the first encounter leaves him blandly upbeat. “He seems quite nice,” he tells his friend, a sceptical American journalist.
His naivety verges on the comic, but the play is at its most gripping when it takes the opinions of this specialist in economic history seriously. Played by Bobby Bradley, and known only as Stranger, he is the author of In Defence of Kampuchea, a paean to the Khmer Rouge, and is predisposed to see the good in policies such as the centralisation of a money-free economy.
Played by David Lee-Jones, and known as Brother, the dictator plays teasing power games with his visitor, taciturn one moment, garrulous the next. Even at his most manipulative in Andrea Ling’s production for A Play, a Pie and a Pint, he is in earnest about his politics. “Cities are poisons for the mind,” may not be a conventional viewpoint but it appears to be honestly held.
It is hard to take issue with the journalist, played gutsily by Nicole Cooper, and her horror at a regime that seeks to “divide, dehumanise and destroy”. But the play is at its most interesting when it entertains the possibility of Stranger’s point that capitalist values lead us to dismiss alternative ideologies too readily.
When Brother admits to executing his political enemies, Stranger crumbles and the academic’s awakening robs the play of its dramatic tension. You would expect some self-justification, but Stranger’s capitulation is total and the play’s nuance becomes blunted – all Bradley can do is quiver. It turns out genocidal dictators are not so nice after all.
At Òran Mór, Glasgow, until 13 September. Then at Traverse theatre, Edinburgh, 16–20 September.
