Theater turns riots into a drama
Associated Press
LONDON
It sounds like a tough sell for an evening out: Come relive the London riots.
But that is the offer currently packing audiences into London’s Tricycle Theatre, a small venue that has built a big reputation with fact-based plays about divisive issues, from Guantanamo Bay to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“The Riots,” which opened recently, vividly recreates the mayhem that raged for four nights in August through the testimony of real people — residents, police, politicians, community workers and the rioters themselves.
Director Nicholas Kent said the play was intended to take the place of a public inquiry into the riots, which the government has declined to hold.
“It didn’t have to happen,” Kent said. “That’s the thing I totally took away from our work on the play.
“It seemed to us important to explore the reasons for the riots and people’s motivations and what happened and what our response was to it as Londoners — and how we could prevent something like that happening again.”
The riots were triggered by the fatal police shooting, in disputed circumstances, of 29-year-old Mark Duggan in the working-class London district of Tottenham on Aug. 4.
The play shows how Duggan’s death led, partly through accidents and missteps, to Britain’s worst civil unrest in a generation.
The mayhem across London and other English cities left hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of property damage, as well as pain and questions, in its wake.
Writer Gillian Slovo and her researchers taped 56 hours of interviews with everyone from police officers on duty in Tottenham that night to community leaders, young looters and a man left homeless by arson.
They even heard from two people imprisoned for rioting.