Americans

American president William McKinley was assassinated in 1901 at a particularly precipitous time in world history.

Eric Schlosser, better known as the author of such books as Fast Food Nation, wrote this play in 1987, using the events of that period as an illustration board for America's burgeoning sense of national identity.

It would be interesting to know whether he developed it further following 9/11, since McKinley's assassin, Leon Czolgosz, is full of talk on the potential dangers of America's bombastic foreign policy. Either way, Americans' greatest strength is its topicality.

Director Dominic Dromgoole dispenses with set design and instead opens up the entire stage, filling it with atmospheric smoke, and using spotlights to differentiate the individual scenes.

It's an effective technique, even if it overemphasises the diffuse structure of Schlosser's play, too much of which is devoted to incidental character scenes when we could have done with a more penetrating sense of political context.

Not enough is known of McKinley to truly understand the motivation of his assassin: is Czolgosz a hopeless idealist, wanton anarchist or plain mad?

Americans does, however, powerfully illustrate the gap between the common ideals of America's constitution and their use as justification for all manner of political policy.