A very human horror

One night, watching the evening news, it struck Robin Soans that four of the five lead stories were about terrorism. Yet at the end of the broadcast, the writer was no wiser about what terrorism actually was. 'I wanted to know who these bombers and insurgents were,' he says. 'What makes them do the things they do?'

To find out, Soans and director Max Stafford-Clark went in search of the people involved in some of the most violent events in recent history and asked them. They tracked down the Brighton bomber and they spoke to Lord Tebbit and his wife.

They interviewed a former head of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and talked to Terry Waite. They spoke to a former child soldier in Uganda who, at the age of 13, was overseeing acts of mass torture and they listened to a psychologist who, after explaining why terrorism can appear so attractive to confused teenagers, declared that the difference between a terrorist and the rest of us 'really isn't that great'.

The results form the latest Out Of Joint verbatim play which, like previous works, uses the testimonies of real people to put human nature under the microscope. Both Soans and Stafford-Clark have employed the technique several times. Soans spoke to the residents of a Bradford housing estate for A State Affair and to Palestinians and Israelis for The Arab-Israeli Cookbook; Stafford-Clark worked with David Hare last year to produce the railway docudrama The Permanent Way.

But Talking To Terrorists goes much further. Not just because it gets beneath a global issue that is only represented through the lens of politicians and pundits rather than by the people closest to it, but because the meaning of terrorism is so slippery. 'One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter,' says Soans. 'If anyone I spoke to had fitted the general perception of a terrorist, I wouldn't have survived the interview.'

In their pursuit of understanding a little more and condemning a little less, Soans and Stafford-Clark have ignored questions of right and wrong. They chose simply to listen. The result is a tapestry of voices that offers many points of view, a play that doesn't seek excuses for terrorism but frequently unearths reasons.