The Witness review, Royal Court Upstairs

What did you do in the war, Daddy?

Viv Franzmann's first play, Mogadishu, examined racial tensions and the distortion of truth for personal ends in a Hackney school. Her second play, The Witness, examines racial identity through the same prism, but while it is as powerful and extraordinary as its predecessor, its focus is on the global, encompassing the political, the personal and the perfidious.

Set in a Hampstead house in which the audience also sits, The Witness develops around the life of war photographer, Joseph, whose hunger for game-changing pictures has blinded him to the fact that the only game that photographs change is the conversation. They don't change behaviours. Freshly home from university is Joseph's daughter, Alex, who he photographed and rescued unharmed, from a pile of corpses in a Rwandan church. While he worries about her education, she's asking about the small boy, cropped from the photograph in which she featured.

Franzmann carefully fits together complex narrative strands, each complete in itself and each examining questions of identity. We are watching an intensely loving but difficult parent-child relationship built around the usual niggles of lost handsets and loud music, develop into something far darker. A good man starts to implode from guilt while his daughter confronts a history that had seemed very far away. When the mystery boy in the photograph, Alex's brother Simon, forces his way back into their consciousness everything they both hold dear is exposed for cruel examination from trust and loyalty to mastery of the household.

In conclusion: Simon Goodwin directs a brilliant cast brilliantly. Danny Webb plays complex with Olympian turns of mood both shocking and sad. Pippa Bennett-Warner is painfully guileless and moving as Alex. Take a hanky.

References
Ian Shuttleworth review in The Financial Times
Royal Court Theatre, tickets
Mogadishu, the Monkey Matters review