FCA Performance presents a third year production

Talking To Terrorists

Writer: Robin Soans
Director: Mark Haslam

Why does anyone blow up a pub full of people? Strap explosives to their body? Hold terrified children hostage? And even if we understand the whys, how can they…? What makes ordinary people do extreme things?

From peacemakers, politicians, journalists, hostages, psychologists and, perhaps most importantly, those who've crossed the line themselves, Talking to Terrorists is the result of 12 months of meetings with people from around the world who have direct experience of terror.

Their stories takes us from a child soldier in Uganda, to former members of the IRA and the UVF in Northern Ireland, includes Turkish Kurds and Palestinians, as well as those who have seen action in Iraq, and even into the heart of the British establishment.

Playwright Robin Soans internationally renowned for verbatim theatre works thought he knew what separated ordinary people from terrorists until he began research for this production. Originally commissioned by the Royal Court Theatre and Out of Joint Theatre Company, Soans wanted, ‘to take the opposite of the tabloid view. I want to look at people trying to stem the tide and live in the shadow of scandal. This is the story we never get’.

This is a play that presents stories of great courage, as well as great suffering, triumphs of the human spirit as well as its collapse into barbarism.

Director Mark Haslam, a graduate of FCA Performance, most recently directed Project: ALICE at Sydney’s Carriage Works and was assistant director on Gallipoli for the Sydney Theatre Company.

With the set and lighting design by emerging scenographer Emma Lockhart-Wilson and sound designers, Ben Clink, Mitch Noakes and Robert Parish, this highly topical and politically invigorating production, interweaves verbatim accounts from former terrorists, their victims and the politicians who attempt to negotiate with them.

I will be astonished if the year turns up a more important, illuminating or moving play than this.

Telegraph, London, 2005

Season: Thursday 28 – Saturday 31 May at 8pm Nightly
Bookings: 02 4221 4889
Tickets: $20 full, $12 S/P/U, $5 FCA students
Performance Space: Building 25.168 University of Wollongong

For interviews and media enquiries please contact Tanya Barton-Saad on 02 4221 5853