BU21 (NHB Modern Plays)

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You’ve based the piece on real testimonies – how did you go about taking these testimonies and morphing them into a piece of theatre? As you’ll have gathered, the piece eschews any semblance of a hushed, reverential tone in favour of disarming frankness. This can take your breath away with the depth of its moral challenge. Ana, a Romanian waitress who was sunbathing on Eel Brook Common and suffered appalling burns from the aviation fuel, says she does not know whether it’s a miracle or a curse that the human body can live through so much. But she certainly deplores the force – “God or adrenaline or whatever” – that kept a young mother, shredded by the blast down one side “like pulled pork”, in existence for just long enough to learn that her baby had perished. Or the candour can make you gasp with uneasy laughter at the play's refusal to be politically correct and at its determination to question its own procedures. Amongst the trauma and suffering lurks an awful lot of humour… gallingly graphic, desperately bleak, heartrendingly sad and quite, quite hilarious' Exeunt Magazine However fictional, this event reminds us of the tragedies that occur nowadays with frightening regularity – school massacres, suicide bombs, mass shootings… Pretty grim subject for a play performed at the theatre in the very heart of the West End, but the location – between the main tourist attractions (as well as terrorist targets): Big Ben and Trafalgar Square – makes the subject even more relevant. I’m not watching a moralistic drama documentary but an immersive piece of theatre with characters I care about played by a refreshing, young, energetic cast, sculptured by an equally energetic and talented new director, Matt Bond.

With the chairs of the audience being arranged into a semi-circle, my mind’s eye immediately conjured up images of an interrogation room, an arena, and a courtroom. Certainly, Rabbit’s Head (in particular, the incredibly talented directorial dynamic duo of Josh Myers and Josh BG) do everything in their power to put their characters on trial, as they confess to the audience their deepest secrets and overwhelming psychological anguish. Slade’s play is far from flawless, it’s overlong and so full of f***s from every character that it often dulls and distances, rather than embraces.

Editorial content

Powerful is just one of the many words that I could use to describe BU21. Six very individual stories connect around one event and the PTSD group they attend. As I’ve said above, these are all very different people and it’s really great how the writing makes them all not just believable as characters but as people affected by the disaster that befell the country. The main effect of the writing is to make the audience question how they would react to an event like this? Having been in the RAF based in London during the days when the IRA were at their most active I always assumed I would react with total professionalism to a terrorist outrage but really nobody knows how it will affect them and that is something the play really brings to life, particularly in the character of Graham who does everything wrong yet somehow does something right in his initial response. We might be uncomfortable with the cynicism and the way that it seems by the end of the play to suggest that the Muslim character Clive might improbably become extremely religious as a result of a failed personal relationship. And speaking of the characters, this is a true ensemble piece with every actor bringing not only their real name which adds a nice feeling of authenticity but also a superb performance to the production. I do feel that a couple of the characters, particularly Izzy and Ana, could have been fleshed out a bit more as I felt by the end I didn’t know as much about them as I did about the others. However, there was one stand-out character, and actor for me and that was Alexander Forsyth’s portrayal of Alex. Love him or loathe him – and believe me you will do both – Alex is a fantastic character to play. He is the main one to break the fourth wall and talk directly to the audience – who he both despises and needs. He will make you laugh and make you feel guilty that you did. It would be so easy to overplay him and make him too cynical in his attitudes and treatment of the others but somehow, Alexander manages to keep him just on the right side so he’s not necessarily the complete banker he at first appears.

You may remember a few years ago on Emmerdale they dropped a plane on the village. As you would expect in a soap opera, the effect was devastating for a good month or so but then people and stories moved on and it never gets mentioned anymore. Real life is of course, different to television and it takes a long time for individuals to recover from a devastating event, a theme which is examined in Steven Slade’s BU21 at the Trafalgar Studios. In a series of monologues and a couple of short dialogues, loosely linked by a survivors' therapy group, these young people tell the audience about the way the explosion affected their lives. So you know how on the news these days there's just this endless stream of horrendous shit going down, like every single night? Suicide bombs, mass shootings, genocides, drone strikes, school massacres – it's like the end of the world or something... And you're kind of like – "Could I even cope if that stuff happened to me?"' Whilst the purpose of this little secret is lost on me, the survivors club comprise – Bella Bowen bringing sassiness to a girl who’s trying to come to terms with losing her mother in the tragedy, Ned Rudkins as a highly charismatic, narcissistically arrogant opportunist with a touch of ‘Michael Caine as Alfie’, banker. What a daring feat of writing this is… hauntingly credible, shudderingly so… captures the internal conflict of global terror: the sense that it was somehow deserved, the pull to be part of something, the impulse to laugh and to cry' WhatsOnStageFilled with harrowing moments, dark laughter and charismatic performers, this is a bold directorial debut by Matt Bond. BU21 holds an unapologetic mirror to the face of today’s society. It highlights the terrifying acceptance of tragic events and humbles the viewer to the reality of the experiences of those involuntarily involved. It is a scarce reminder that the trauma continues long after the media has moved on to its next new shiny event.