Hate and shame

Plays will not change the world, but occasionally they manage to influence people for the better.

The Laramie Project, which by June 2003 will have been seen in 450 student productions all over America, is just such a play. It has already shocked and moved young audiences over there and on the Edinburgh Festival fringe. There should be a similar response in London. This production, an adequate amateur one by American students, cries out for professional performance at the National Theatre or Royal Court. But there is still no missing the production's grim impact: its capacity to arouse pity and pain is unrivalled upon the London stage.

The title alludes to the method by which Moises Kaufman, the author, and his Tectonic Theater Project company of actors investigated a peculiarly dreadful, homosexual hatemurder, committed in 1998 in the mid-west town of Laramie. Matthew Shepard, a gay University student was found in a coma, pistol-whipped and lashed to a fence. He was so encrusted with blood that the first person who came upon him thought he had stumbled upon a scarecrow. Two heterosexual

youths, whom he had met in a bar, were convicted of murder.

For nearly a year, Kaufman and his actors visited Laramie. They interviewed Shepard's friends. They visited people obliquely or directly involved in the murder and its aftermath. Then they edited, shaped and wove the reminiscences and responses into a theatrical tapestry which displays mid-west secular and religious attitudes to homophobic murder. The stage is bare, save for a skeletal fence of the kind on which Shepard was lashed, and a changing-room bench. The blue-sky backcloth could be more inventively used in Linda Ames Key's production, that strains misguidedly to give women equal acting opportunities with men: to have

actresses playing Baptist ministers introduces a pantomimic note.

The play is, however, cleverly organised to convey the awful story of Matthew's murder and vignettes of shame, sadness and resentment that attended it. The Baptist minister, whose only comment was to hope that the tortured, dying Shepard brooded about his lifestyle, justifies the countervailing, priestly retort that "the Bible is driving homophobia in this country".

And the hate-free courtroom speech by Matthew's father, superlatively delivered by Fred Sykes, aspires to reconciliation rather than vengeance. Inspiring.

Until 6 April. Box Office: 020 7269 1606.

The Laramie Project