Credible Witness ( Archived )

Reviews

newspaper reviews

(L to R) Benjamin Boateng as Henry, Tea Agbaba as Anna, Adam Kotz as Alexander Karagy, Olympia Dukakis as Petra Karagy, Leona Ekembe as Ameena, Olympia Dukakis as Petra Karagy.

Photography by John Haynes.

Direction: Sacha Wares. Design: Es Devlin. Lighting: Paule Constable.

Cast: Tea Agbaba, Yusuf Altin, Anthony Barclay, Paul Bhattacharjee, Benjamin Boateng, Olympia Dukakis, Vincent Ebrahim, Leona Ekembe, Roland John-Leopoldie, Adam Kotz, Clive Merrison

Those expecting “Credible Witness,” Timberlake Wertenbaker’s new play at the Royal Court Upstairs, to be a searingly topical documentary about the abuse of asylum-seekers in contemporary Britain are in for something of a shock. Wertenbaker’s view of history has always been an oblique one, and this time she is more concerned with the mythical nature of exile than with any actual case-history from the files of the immigration department at Heathrow.

Wertenbaker’s central figure (wonderfully played by Olympia Dukakis as the Mother Courage of the visa queue) is an old Macedonian caf proprietor who has come to England on the trail of a beloved son whom she is convinced the local authorities have somehow mislaid. But even in these gloomy circumstances, Wertenbaker’s playwriting retains a lightness of touch that lifts a distressing catalogue of immigrant ills into a curious affirmation of the life force itself.

Sheridan Morley INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE 21 February 2001

This new work from the author of Our Country’s Good and Three Birds Alighting On A Field tackles passions bubbling under in Britain today and the nature of cultural identity at a time when borders are confused and changing. As usual with Wertenbaker, this will be a many-layered tale full of ideas, expressed with great elegance and rigour.

THE GUIDE 3 -9 February 2001

Wertenbaker’s skill lies in the way she loads this timeless love story of a mother’s inability to let her son go with the far weightier issue of national identity in a world increasingly populated by immigrant subcultures. Helped by both director Sasha War’s poetic choreography and Es Devlin’s abstract set – whose spiralling walk ways evoke the sense of people in constant movement – Wertenbaker conveys something of the overwhelming chaos and history of the world as well as pressing home the need to recognise its individual testimonies.

The play’s concluding consensus that there can be no single reading of history may not be inherently dramatic but Wertenbaker’s sensitive and coherent treatment of her vast subject makes for quietly stimulating theatre.

METRO LONDON Thursday 15th February 2001

“…Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Credible Witness, the most moving – the most compassionate – new play for many months.

Every British politician, every Foreign Office official, and all those involved in issues of immigration and political asylum should see this play. But Credible Witness is larger than mere topicality. “History shifts”: this is one of the several superb points it makes about the ways in which our conception of history is changing.

Credible Witness is a completely “now” play, and yet one thinks of it in the same breath as certain Greek tragedies such as Aeschylus’s The Suppliants. As for Es Devlin’s superlative set – a walled circular labyrinth on several levels – it deserves to win all sorts of prizes: not because it is lovely or astonishing (it certainly is the latter, especially in the small space of the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs), but because it catches every layer of the play. Walls, levels, slopes, history, mazes: a poetic nexus.

FINANCIAL TIMES 15 February 2001

“Wertenbaker’s new play…is to see history in all its vertical complexity.”

“…allowing Wertenbaker to bring her usual humanity and insight to an evening that becomes an intricate…meditation on the merits and demerits of culture and history.”

“…intelligence is everywhere, not least in the play’s definition of history itself.”

“I can think of few if any other dramatists who could give so rounded an account of so immediate yet permanent a topic.”

Benedict Nightingale THE TIMES 15 February, 2001

“Es Devlin’s circular archaeological set…is a constant reminder of the layers of history that make up a country’s culture.”

Jane Edwardes TIME OUT February 21 – 28, 2001

“Alexander – Adam Kotz, determinedly luminous as the shambling, bright-eyed believer”

“Designed by Es Devlin, it’s a masterpiece of compression”

“…the refugees’ stories are immortal, untouchable and unanswerable”

Jonathan Myerson