The gobsmacking moment that led to a drama about Sri Lanka

Daniel Nelson

As artistic director of a theatre group in London, Christine Bacon is offered many scripts and articles, few of which hit the mark. This one was different.

“I put it off for a while because a lot of people send me things to read but when I started I was absolutely gobsmacked,” she recalls.

It wasn’t just because of the scale and horror of BBC journalist Frances Harrison’s account of the Sri Lankan civil war, and particularly its bloody ending, but “because I had no idea of what had occurred there.

“It was quite unbelievable, really, for someone like me not to know, given the work I had been doing, but there had been a media blackout, the government had captured the narrative and no-one had really challenged it.”

She realised that if “events there had passed me by, they must also have passed others by” – like her best friend, “a bit of a political animal like myself, who went to Sri Lanka in 2009 for a holiday and it didn’t even enter our conversation that in a place a couple of hundred miles away people were being slaughtered. It was a wake-up call for me. So I started writing a play about it.”

Her play, The Island Nation, opens at London’s Arcola Theatre on 26 October.

Many of the previous productions presented by ice&fire (“Exploring human rights stories through performance”) have been interview-based verbatim theatre, but this is a fully fictionalised play, though it is based on real events and some scenes draw on actual speeches.

The drama focuses on a young Tamil woman who is trapped in territory held by the secessionist Tamil Tiger as government forces close in. British aid worker Rebecca is desperate to get her out, and Norwegian politician Erik has a peace plan.

Bacon says she hopes she has produced exciting theatre (the publicity describes it as “visceral and revelatory”) but says that the “overarching drive for me is that people know this happened. There’s been no proper memorialisation of events” that have been described as “the biggest unreported war story of our time”.

Has her research for the play changed her views about the war?

“My view? It’s more nuanced. I see how cruel the Tamil Tigers’ tactics were and how they almost brought the country to its knees so there was a clear political objective to defeat them … I gained more understanding of hatred, I guess.” She says she can also understand the Sri Lankan government’s argument to the West: “How can you wag your finger at us – look what you did in Iraq. And we are fighting terrorism while you are perpetuating it.”

She continues to follow events in Sri Lanka: “People were hoping for a change with the new government but they are yet to see much concrete action.

There’s been a regime of unbelievable torture.” She points out that the highest percentage of clients of the London-based organisation Freedom From Torture are Sri Lankans. “Some of the Tamils who come here are not believed,