A British Subject review, Arts Theatre

Scarf ace

Being married to a journalist can be exhausting, particularly if you're a successful actress like Nichola McAuliffe and he's the Daily Mirror's Don McKay - a man who bounces around like Tigger, never pays parking fines even when they're clocked up against your car, and constantly insults the luvvies you're schmoozing for work. One thing's for sure though, the quips across the kitchen table will always be lively.

So it is in Nichola McAuliffe's, A British Subject, her play about Don's efforts to release Mirza Tahir Hussain, a British man on Death Row in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Hussain's sentence was for the killing of a taxi driver during a trip to his ancestral home at the age of 18. The punishment was non-negotiable but constantly commuted. Eighteen years later a date for Hussain's hanging was finally set and McKay was dispatched to investigate. Shocked by what he saw, he wrote a long and powerful feature. When it was commuted to a few paragraphs, McAuliffe was enraged. She wrote to Prince Charles. He intervened. Hussain was freed. 

Where it works, A British Subject chugs at full speed. Where it doesn't is in the middle where we get far too much of Hussain's gracious but tediously slow peroration on his plight. One sighs for want of a more interesting subject, but it's not dinner table repartee we're saving, it's humanity. It's a cry for those people whose names we'll never know, waiting in the shadow of the noose in countries where killing is the ultimate sin for all but the state.

In conclusion: McAuliffe has written and stars, with David Rintoul as McKay, in Hannah Eidinow's lively production. At ninety minutes it neatly ends before turning into a sermon around the faith-fuelled focus of McAuliffe and Hussain.

References
Arts Theatre, buy tickets
Aleks Sierz review for The Arts Desk