Think Euripides: Deborah Brevoort's prize-winning off-Broadway play has obvious echoes of Women of Troy. But, while Brevoort's work has a stony integrity, the application of Greek tragic rules to the Lockerbie disaster creates problems: like Shakespeare's Gertrude, I craved more matter with less art.
The action takes place in the Lockerbie hills seven years after the 1988 plane crash. A grief-maddened American woman anxiously searches for her lost son; her stoic husband and a chorus of local women advise restraint. But the tension largely derives from a clash between the local Lockerbie women and a State Department official. They want to wash the clothes of the crash's victims in an act of ritual purification, whereas the American government wants everything burned. In the end, the women prevail in an attempt to prove that "hatred will not be the last word in Lockerbie".
Derived from fact, the play deals with a potently topical situation: the emotional aftermath of terrorism. But while Brevoort argues, like Euripides, that the victims must learn to overcome the past, she handicaps herself by her own fidelity to old forms. The key moment when the Washington wallah undergoes a change of heart is reported rather than seen.
Grief and suffering also take precedence over politics: the argument that the crash was retaliation for American action in shooting down an Iranian passenger jet is tantalisingly aired but never explored. The result is a play less radical than its Euripidian role model - one that dared to address an all-male audience with an anti-war argument articulated by women.
Auriol Smith's production, however, has the right ritualistic severity and is powerfully performed. Lisa Eichhorn and John Hudson are both impressive, as the American mother who learns how to harness grief and the stiff-backed husband who learns how to acknowledge it. Colette O'Neil, in tweeds and sensible shoes, also strongly embodies the resolution of the Lockerbie women.
But I can't help feeling that the real story of how the local residents spent a year washing 11,000 items of clothing retrieved from the crash is more moving than any drama.
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