Written by Jack MacGregor

Directed by Andrea Ling

Review by Olivia Burns

Traverse Theatre

The last two productions by A Play, A Pie, A Pint at the Traverse have brought us two diverse yet coalescing conversations on the representation of history; last week’s Wallace concerned itself with the impact of archival representation on modern cultural identities, and this week’s Our Brother, written by Jack Macgregor and directed by Andrea Ling shows the genesis of this process to us directly. We meet three central characters; ‘Brother’, Cambodian leader of the Khmer Rouge, ‘Stranger’, , an idealistic academic who is blinded by revolutionary principles and promises who is gifted with the ‘privilege’ of a conversation with Brother, and a Journalist, who functions as the external mediator and voice of reason throughout. You can see where things might take a turn…

David Lee-Jones soars as the genuinely scary and attention-demanding Brother, injecting a clever and compelling volatility. Erratic bursts of anger and jolts of action are skilful and sparing, and are played to tremendous effect as it becomes more and more excruciatingly clear that Brother is a manipulator of representations, with no obligations to promise life to the people he gives audience to, let alone truth.

MacGregor’s script functions very intriguingly as a dramatized conversation, happening both in real-time and also retrospectively interrogated in a spaciotemporal paradigm that is admittedly convoluted at points. The most arresting quality of MacGregor’s play, though, is the subtextual interrogation of the ethics of journalism, and the powerful hand-of-God of those in charge of representing history. Indeed, the Stranger’s naivety that blinds him to the ‘genocide’ committed by Brother is deluded as ‘necessary’ in the interest of international betterment and ‘purification of thought’. The power afforded by his privilege to represent ideology this way leads to his own personal tragedy; microcosmic of the international damage and insurmountable death of paralleled propaganda in the 20^th century.

Whilst MacGregor’s densely researched script manages to excavate a believable and thoughtful discussion on matters of cult, propaganda and historical representation, the trajectory of Stranger is at points underdeveloped. Played by the highly skilled and competent Bobby Bradley, Stranger’s initial gullibility is at best frustrating and at worst petulant, and thus whose revelation of atrocity is more exasperating than hard-hitting. Whilst this is almost undeniably intentional, the realisation of the play’s climax might be better accomplished with greater attention to the nuance of the role of stillness in the building of tension, rather than just emotional maximalism which, at times, can verge on melodrama that deflates the build of tension carefully nurtured in the first 40 minutes.

That being said, Nicole Cooper’s impressive performance as the journalist strikes a rare and glorious balance between controlled and passionate, with a real skill for communicating fear. Cooper’s performance functions as a very valuable tool in ameliorating the risk of melodrama in a narrative that is entirely terrifying and, unfortunately, entirely pertinent in a modern world where censorship encroaches as an impending threat to freedom of speech in nations not so detached as we may dare to think.

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