This is the last article you can read this month
You can read more article this month
You can read more articles this month
Sorry your limit is up for this month
Reset on:
Please help support the Morning Star by subscribing here
The Time of Our Lies
Park Theatre
★★★★
THE Time of Our Lies is a brutal, thought-provoking meditation on the importance of history in combating the all too common warmongering of our contemporary world leaders.
First staged at the 2014 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where it was nominated for an Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award, the play currently runs on the Park Theatre’s main stage.
“If you don’t know history it is as if you were born yesterday,” noted American historian Howard Zinn tells us. “And if you were born yesterday, anybody in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it.”
Written by Bianca Bagatourian, The Time of Our Lives brings together Zinn’s own writings with other stories of war and oppression. There’s a definite hint of verbatim theatre here, but that’s a reductive description of the fascinating and moving tapestry of music and words that Che Walker’s production offers us.
US actor Daniel Benzali was slated to play Howard Zinn in this production, but due to ill health Martina Laird took over the role. Playing the part with less than 48 hours’ preparation, Laird does a remarkable job, injecting a thoughtful humanity and texture into Zinn’s weighty words.
In many ways, the casting of Laird is an accidental stroke of genius. While the intellectual connections the play makes between racial violence in the US and US military actions abroad are clear, there’s something powerful about casting a black female actor as the voice offering an historical overview.
With all due respect to Benzali, one rather wonders what could have been with Laird anchoring the whole run.
Sometimes Bagatourian’s play can feel rushed, when actually the most powerful moments are those where we must sit with the horrific violence of war and oppression, and sometimes scenes blur in ways that can cloud the narrative.
But overall, this is an important history, which movingly uses testimony, along with protest and war songs, to move ideas from the intellectual to the emotive.
It offers us a vital call to dissent and, at a time when world politics can easily leave us feeling helpless, powerfully reminds us that “the world is changed by small acts.”
Runs until August 10, box office: parktheatre.co.uk
