CityLife

Palace of the End

LIKE True Love Lies in the Royal Exchange’s main house, Judith Thompson’s Palace Of The End is a piece of new writing by a Canadian writer.

That aside, this play couldn’t be more different from Brad Fraser’s – save that both of them are brilliantly fluid, utterly absorbing pieces of modern drama.

Palace Of The End takes on one of the most important events in our recent history, the war in Iraq and some of its consequences.

Directed by Greg Hersov, who’s openly passionate about the play and its subject, it’s structured as three monologues – two of them from characters we all recognise from the news headlines, the third a fictional character.

First seen, in My Pyramids, is Lynndie England (Kellie Bright), a pregnant US soldier awaiting trial for the torture and degradation of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib.

It’s a measure of the play’s precision and depth, as well as the excellence of Bright’s performance, that she emerges not merely as a monster but as a complex, conflicted character.

There are even some laughs to be had at this stage of the evening.

Sexing up

Next we see David Kelly (Robert Demeger), the man who disclosed the ‘sexing up” of Tony Blair’s justification for war, awaiting his own lonely death on Harrowdown Hill, a place where this tormented man could find some peace and which gives this section of the play its name.

Again, Thompson’s writing and Demeger’s splendid performance brings a character familiar to us from the news headlines to believable, tragic life.

Finally, and perhaps most devastatingly, Eve Polycarpou gives another brilliant performance as an Iraqi woman, called Nehrjas, in Instruments Of Yearning.

Her tale of hope betrayed, of her family’s torture and the death of her brave young son at the hands of the devilish Saddam’s thugs is almost unbearably moving.

Despite its structure and use of familiar characters, Palace of the End is not a docudrama.

Instead the facts are unflinchingly woven into a compelling, compassionate and often poetic piece, where words and images such as the apparently innocent date-palm tree, bind the different sections together in unexpected ways and whose cumulative impact is startlingly powerful. 

Palace Of The End is on at the Royal Exchange Studio until Saturday, February 21. Call 0161 833 9833.

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