Anders Lustgarten is the most internationally minded dramatist working in Britain today. In this short, sharp play he confronts us with the Roboski massacre, in which 34 unarmed Kurdish civilians were killed in December 2011 on the Turkish-Iraqi border. Even if matching the number of scenes to the body-count inevitably leads to a fragmented narrative, the play makes its point with a controlled ferocity.
Lustgarten works like a movie-maker in that he starts with a close-up and then gradually widens the angle of vision. He first shows us members of a poor Kurdish family who habitually make the border-crossing to bring back diesel. Turkish forces, alerted by an American drone, mistakenly take the smugglers for terrorists and send in F16 planes to wipe them out.
But Lustgarten goes on to show the Turkish media’s complicity with the military’s sanitised version of events, and the ultimate reponsibility of the international arms industry. Much the best scene, because it’s the longest, shows an arms-manufacturer suavely making the case for increased defence-spending and arguing, with no visible sense of irony, that his trade is “essential to world peace”.
But Lustgarten never lets us forget that bombs kill people and that, among the Roboski victims were several teenagers trying to raise money to pay for their education. Mehmet Ergen’s production, played in English with Turkish surtitles, effectively combines the human drama with a hi-tech design by Anthony Lamble that shows the movements of the Kurdish convoy being aerially tracked by American drones.
While Aslam Percival Husain as a practised smuggler and Karina Fernandez as his pregnant wife quietly impress, this is an ensemble piece that shows how one particular atrocity is part of a wider culture of remote-control destruction.
• Until 2 April. Box office: 020-7503 1646. Venue: Arcola theatre, London.
