Simon Stephens' new play refuses to see the 7/7 bombers as evil. Has he got a point?

Simon Stephens' new play refuses to see the 7/7 bombers as evil. Has he got a point?

The bombings, says Stephens, were 'as British as Tizer'

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Does theatre have the right to make us feel uncomfortable? Photograph: Getty

One of the most intriguing plays to surface so far at the fringe is Pornography, by Simon Stephens (whose Harper Regan was recently staged at the National Theatre). It charts the lives of a number of characters on July 6, 2005 - the day London won the bid to host the 2012 Olympics - and July 7, when 52 people were killed in bombs on Underground trains and a bus. One of his characters is a suicide bomber.

It is three years since these acts of terrorism took place, and the wounds are still raw. My own view is that Stephens has every right to excavate these events - theatre would have little reason to exist if it didn't make us deeply uncomfortable - but his uncompromising stance will, I suspect, offend some.

He resolutely refuses to brand the bomber in his play evil. He characterises the bombings as acts as "British as Tizer". His contention is that our society is fractured, dissociated, pornographic. All the characters in his play - recognisable, even sympathetic as they are - share a certain underlying inability to connect with others. The imagery they use is often casually brutal. The sense is that all the characters are reacting to the same set of deeply ingrained societal circumstances: it just that one of them happens to react rather more violently than the rest. The play makes nothing of the bomber's religion or politics; as he passes through England on the train to London, he drinks bad black coffee from Upper Crust, tries to buy an almond croissant, fantasises about a woman in the same carriage. It is all incredibly normal. But I don't doubt that most people - myself included - find the bombings easier to digest if we think of the bombers are somehow alien and "other". This play refuses to let us do that. The terrorists, he contends, were people like us.

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