Can We Talk About This? DV8 Physical Theatre - review

Lloyd Newson’s latest piece of dance theatre is not just brave in the theatrical sense. It is, literally, courageous.

A play about free speech and Islam, using verbatim testimony from those living under death threats and those with a fondness for issuing them, Can We Talk About This? has already attracted almost as much controversy as praise since opening in Australia last summer.

It provokes from the outset. Hannes Langolf slides along a wall as if under fire, asking the audience for a show of hands to see how many of us think we are morally superior to the Taliban. He notes with disappointment that the figure is only about 20 per cent. He explains why it should be higher.

While the tally of abuses inspired by fundamentalism rises, names and dates are scrawled across the walls of the set. As much as it is about liberal confusion or religious intolerance, Can We Talk About This? is about keeping record. The cast of 10 bring dozens of voices to life with remarkable power, considering how hard they also have to work on choreography that never stops weaving ironic patterns around the words. Joy Constantinides gives Shirley Williams arms like a doctored set of scales as she explains why Salman Rushdie should not have been knighted. Langolf, as Christopher Hitchens, turns a copy of the Satanic Verses into a flying dove to refute her.

Even the darkest sections are beautiful. Christina May elegantly traces lines on her body while speaking the words of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who wrote the film Submission, over which director Theo Van Gogh was murdered in Holland in 2004. It is a mystifying ritual until she explains that the pair’s “blasphemy” was to write, on the skin of women made up to look bruised and battered, text from the Qu’ran authorising husbands to beat their wives.

Respecting someone’s rights, Newson argues, is not necessarily

the same as respecting their ideas. Anything worth saying will offend someone, somewhere. And choosing to keep silent is a betrayal of everyone who is denied a voice by another’s beliefs.

Until March 28 (020 7452 3000, nationaltheatre.org.uk)