Andrew Haydon
posted 10 May 2007

Ned has a problem. He has invented a new unmanned drone which can operate independently from satellite control – rather than needing soldiers to pilot the craft remotely. It would be capable of finding and destroying enemy personnel inside cave systems, bombed-out shelters, and remote towns crawling with hostile snipers, using its own intelligent computer systems. It is potentially the perfect killing machine for modern, anti-insurgent/terrorist warfare. But there are ethical questions.

Ned’s brother Dan - a private dentist running a Botox treatment operation on the side - is the first to raise them, appalled that his brother may be on the verge of taking a central role in potential future massacres. Beyond this, there is also the question of funding; Ned is tied to a government research facility that will only pay for further research and development with certain provisos, which effectively curtail Ned’s intellectual property and, more importantly, give the British government the right to export the drone to 'America and Israel'. As the play progresses, Ned is made to realise that having become involved and invented the weapon, he has no alternative than to accept any terms and conditions that may henceforth be imposed on him.

Joe Penhall’s new play is about as finely crafted as you could wish. The dialogue is funny, clever, and profoundly human; the structure is neat, unshowy and hugely effective. Despite occasional lapses into simple, point-by-point arguments on politics or morality, the play retains a warm centre in which the dilemma is the more interesting for not being addressed directly, but depicted as a spat between two brothers whose relationship itself is the subject of tricky negotiation. Tom Hollander as the fastidious visionary Ned and Julian Rhind-Tutt as his careworn, more louche brother are both excellent and Roger Michell’s traverse staging in the Cottesloe is a fine use of the space - ensuring every audience member is virtually on top of the action.

Where the play does less well, is in its rather unsophisticated approach to its politics. The central ethical question is a sound one: what is the responsibility of those who could invent weapons of terrifying magnitude? It’s a question that has been asked several times before: Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, Alastair Smith’s Enola, Howard Brenton’s The Genius, even Terry Nation’s Dr Who story 'Genesis of the Daleks'. Beyond this there is a curious diversion as the plot gets gradually sucked into a second line of inquiry centred on intellectual property and rights of a creator to decide the destiny of his creation. It works well with the story, although at times it does read strangely more like a rant by a writer stuck in Development Hell than a dissection of Britain’s military R&D capabilities.

Because of the specificity of the play’s setting – very much present-day, suburban London with its background of the war in Iraq and the ongoing Middle Eastern conflicts or the threat of North Korean aggression – the ethical landscape is generated by liberal distaste for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Rather than dealing with the actual, abstract moral question, the play often relies on the prejudices of its audience chiming with those of the author. Why, after all, should Israel not be allowed to defend itself from attack with machines that Britain may develop? The question boils down to one of responsibility, with the initial, rather parochial, implication that the British would probably do the right thing with these new super-hi-tech weapons and that the Americans, or Israelis, let alone the North Koreans or Iranians, probably wouldn’t. This is a rather different question to that of whether mankind is best employed creating ever more efficient machines with which to restore peace through sudden, mechanised mass slaughter.

Till 7 June 2007