REVIEW: Sense Of An Ending, Theatre 503 ✭✭✭✭

Sense Of An Ending

Theatre 503

15 May 2015

4 Stars

Slatted blinds provide a see-through curtain in front of a wooden interior with a couple of bare light bulbs suspended and two doors upstage set into a glass partition. A rifle and cap are perched on one of three chairs. A nun gently swings a censer as we take our seats. The blinds are raised by a man in uniform who turns out to be a prison guard, and we find ourselves in Kigali, Rwanda, for Ken Urban’s unflinching drama set at the end of the 1990s in the wake of genocide. Two Hutu nuns, Sister Justina (Lynette Clarke) and Sister Alice (Akiya Henry), are awaiting trial for alleged complicity in a massacre that took place within their own church. They have agreed to give a single interview to an American journalist, Charles (Ben Onwukwe), ahead of their transfer to Belgium to stand trial. Alongside the statements of the nuns we hear the caustic, sceptical views of the journalist’s Tutsi security detail, Paul (Abubakar Salim), and experience the searing testimony of the one surviving witness, Dusabi (Kevin Golding). Together with the journalist we in the audience are asked to reflect on where the balance of truth may lie, and how, if at all, a ‘sense of ending’ can be found in the face of acts of such brutality that their scale is hard to compass and imagine. How can a dramatic framework plausibly be found for real-life events that claimed, on a conservative estimate, at least 800,000 Tutsi lives in only 100 days?

This is the European premiere of a play that has already won the award for Best New Play at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Rightly so. The author wisely resists the temptation to turn this play into a forensic detective thriller and instead of focusing merely or narrowly on the guilt or innocence of the nuns, Urban invites us to reflect on a range of large and troubling issues: most obviously the scope and scale of genocide and the extent of moral responsibility for those caught up in it; but also the role and responsibilities of the journalist in recording and investigating such horrors, and the question of whether forgiveness is either possible or meaningful in such circumstances. Perhaps above all we are invited to reflect on the nature of truth itself – both who to believe and whether there can actually be a single identifiable truth which is morally unambiguous, as opposed to different perceptions all of which deserve a degree of credence and respect. These are large, heavy and important issues – indeed it is hard to think of more significant ones – but Urban deserves the highest praise for presenting them to us with a great deal of humour and fine, naturalistic dialogue that builds character effectively, and leaves things refreshingly open-ended. We have enough space to weigh up the implications of what we are hearing while still savouring an effective and moving drama, with many intriguing twists and turns along the way.

Much of the play consists of the interviews between Charles and the nuns themselves. Ben Onwukwe is very successful in representing his character’s personal insecurities as well as his uncertainties over his best course of action as a responsible journalist. We learn that he took on this assignment as a way of recovering his reputation after a lapse of journalistic ethics, and that his own failure of courage on a past assignment led to the death of a colleague. As a result of his own fallibility and doubt we are ready to accept him as the conscience of the audience. His doubts and anxieties become our own very effectively by the end. In contrast, Sister Justina starts as the toughest character - a worldly-wise elder nun, determined to tell the truth as she sees it, while also trying to use the opportunity of this interview as free publicity to assist their case at trial. However, Lynette Clarke skilfully traces her gradual collapse of confidence as the play progresses – what starts as hard-edged authority is revealed to be a brittle shell that cracks under external and internal questioning. In contrast, the apparently more vulnerable and suggestible Sister Alice turns out to be much more adept in her battle of wits with Charles. Akiya Henry shows her character growing in confidence and indeed developing considerable media savvy by the final scenes, while retaining a disturbing air of suppressed hysteria in her behaviour and attitudes. As Paul, the Tutsi security guard, Abubakar Salim plays an important role in balancing the plausibility of the nun’s case with an undercutting alternative. Alongside their statements we are required to weigh all the evidence from the other side that is recounted by him, accompanied by some fine moments of anger and grim-faced gallows humour. Another crucial supporting part is contributed by Kevin Golding: as the only witness and survivor of what actually happened in the massacre at the church it is through his account we finally experience the events in narrative flashback. It is this moment that forces Charles – and we the audience – to rethink our sense of events. It would easy for author and actor to overplay this melodramatic scene, but by retaining a sense of ambiguity and uncertainty within the tense confusion of events, the effect is to make him more rather than less convincing as a witness, and to take us deeper into the heart of darkness. Without that journey the act of forgiveness that comes near the play’s end would hardly be credible..

As this fine play moved towards its nuanced ending I could not help making a comparison with an earlier work that placed nuns in a setting of impossible choice: Poulenc’s opera, Dialogues of the Carmelites. Back in the 1950s, with France still traumatised by the moral compromises of Vichy, it was easier to imagine their embracing a clarity of moral integrity and determination in the face of state brutality. But the conclusion here is that the facts do no longer speak for themselves and that neither truths nor lies make sense as black-and-white categories any more… as the title suggests there are no definitive ‘endings’ only various accounts which may be lesser or greater fictions. This is not an endorsement of relativism – individual moral action is still possible the cause of good and evil, but it remains a struggle to generalise outwards from the charred fragments that contemporary history leaves us to ponder. Sense Of And Ending runs until 6th June 2015 at Theatre 503