A terrible dilemma and a super play
STaRTLinG question from a court-house play which opened this week: could it be right for an air force pilot to shoot down an airliner if it had been hijacked and was hurtling towards a football stadium packed with 70,000 fans?
When the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, booked this fascinating show it can little have imagined that it would open after a month of such frightful terrorism in Britain.
although the title may seem a little insensitive, the show is powerfully topical. The staging is simple: in a high-ceilinged court gather a judge, prosecutor, defence lawyer, the accused and two witnesses, plus a silent court usher.
The audience plays the part of the jury. at the end of the show it casts its verdict using handsets.
is Major Lars Koch guilty of murdering the 164 people who died in the airliner?
Family-man Koch is a top fighter pilot. His decision to fire the heat- seeking missile which downed the plane was taken in clear-minded defiance of a recent decision by the Supreme Court.
The play, by Ferdinand von Schirach, is German. This takes it one small step away from a British audience, some of the legal discussion being about the primacy of the German constitution, which apparently forbids any one life being adjudged more important than another.
‘The constitution is more intelligent than we are,’ says the primly superior prosecutor. i wonder if a German audience might feel a stronger attachment to that claim than an audience in Britain, even in West London.
Thank goodness we have no written constitution in this country.
Sean Holmes’s cast does the business efficiently, without any Germanic touches. Forbes Masson’s prickly defence lawyer has a Scots accent. The rest of the characters use Received Pronunciation.
ashley Zhangazha as Koch only flares up once, when he argues that airline passengers knowingly put themselves in harm’s way when they board a flight. as for the state’s claim that no life is to be valued above another, how does that square with the military oath in which a soldier undertakes to sacrifice his life for the country?