A Human Being Died That Night review, Hampstead Downstairs

Eugene De Kock is the perfect name for a real life baddie, and they don't come much worse than an apparatchik of apartheid who literally arrested, kidnapped and booby-trapped hundreds of opponents of the South  African government before murdering them. Nicholas Wright's play is an adaptation of a book by the black South African psychologist, Pumla Bobodo-Madikizela. A member of Mandela's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Bobodo-Madikizela went on to interview De Kock for some months after he asked for, and was granted, forgiveness by the relatives of some of his victims.

Dirty hands

The nature of forgiveness is that it is a release of the heat within. It is the calm after the storm. Anger is put aside and the process of healing begins both for those who have been wronged and left behind, and for the perpetrator who has understood the error of his ways and through his sorrow and shame, provides closure. It's a powerful behavioural cycle, but it is the end of a cycle. What this means in terms of drama is that there's no heat and tension - it's a gentle ride - and the nature of this particular play's framing - a series of physically and emotionally passive conversations in a prison cell - leaves the audience in a dramatic void. There is nothing to grasp.


Wright's script highlights how close we all are to veering from the path of righteousness, and one needs only to think of death camps in Bosnia or nerve gas in Syria, of bombs in Iraq and plutonium in North Korea, to see how easily people switch from good to evil if there is a theoretical framework to which they can pin their crimes. It's an interesting intellectual debate, and there is some pleasure to be had in watching Bobodo-Madikizela push De Kock to the point where he finally confronts his own response to murdering a man, but even at that point, there is no psychological or physical tension.

In conclusion: Clear headed performances from the wonderful Noma Dumezweni and Matthew Marsh keep you watching, but both my companions complained about the lack of narrative arc, and ventured it was rather flat and uninspiring.

References
Hampstead Theatre, Tickets

Hampstead Theatre is on Eton Avenue, Swiss Cottage, London NW3 3EU   Production ends 15 June