There’s something peculiarly fascinating, alluring even, about the Western domestic ‘terrorist’ groups of the 1960s and 1970s. Small bands with fierce sounding names and a fierce sounding intelligence. Bright young boys and girls listening to good music and smoking and drinking and setting off bombs. Perhaps it’s merely an extension of the continued fetishisation of that particular time and its distant, earnest hopefulness. Perhaps it’s the idea of terrorist that we can relate to, potentially even sympathise with, that is something to hold on to.

The Weathermen, born out of the radical student movements of the mid 1960s, flared brightly and briefly in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At their peak they launched an angry spate of high-profile fire bombings and explosions aimed at the government, the police and the FBI in response to the suppression of the Black Panthers and the continuing war in Vietnam. They are perhaps most famous through for the two incidents that obliquely bookend this fascinating little piece – the ‘Days of Rage’ riots in Chicago and an accidental nail bomb blast in a safe house in New York that killed three of the groups leading members.

In a beautifully written and ferociously delivered opening monologue, the show sets out a nominally quite historically specific question: what happened in that period? What led from the disappointment of the under-attended and quickly suppressed riots in Chicago to the disaster of a few years later? What we get in the next hour and a half however, is far more interesting than any spurious historical theorising.

Instead this is a piece that is more about us and our fascination with these people and this period. With a commendable confidence, writer-director Charlie Shand borrows liberally from this period in the construction of a story that is very much his own. Shand creates a brilliant, messy patchwork of ideas, incidents, songs and fantasies of the 1960s. His characters speak in a knowingly theatrical dialect – a weird poetry of ‘mans’ and ‘babes’ and ‘fucks’ that is less an attempt at mimicking any 1960s speech patterns than inventing his own idea of the 1960s. A representation, a dream, of the past existing in a very different present.

His characters are as much classical gods and heroes as they are flawed 1960s revolutionaries. Fingal McKiernan’s Terry (based, loosely, on Terry Robbins, the main perpetrator and one of the victims of the New York explosion) is a Dionysian enigma – followed to the point of destruction by dazed acolytes flushed with desire. Amanda McLaren’s obstinate Rae borrows just as heavily from Antigone in her unwillingness to sacrifice one iota of her ideals under increasingly desperate interrogation by the excellent Rebecca Killick.

This is theatre that nods less towards the radicalism of the 1960s and more towards the amphitheatres of a much, much earlier time – a fact which is brilliantly alluded to in the final monologue, a harrowingly comic 1960s retelling of the myth of Pandora; like Lenny Bruce channelling Aristotle. In this the show seems to be answering a very different question to the one it poses at the start, less what happened and more: why do we continue to care?

The answer to which seems to be – we don’t all that much; we just want a new way to retell old myths. All the songs and the language and the ideology and the mythology of the 1960s is reduced to an aesthetic, a posture. Just a new set of clothes for old stories. Even history, with all its facts and dates and timelines, is more about telling old stories than finding any imaginary truth. We want reassurance of our right decisions and our place in the world and we look for it in history.

We can never know about what happened in that safe house in the moments before it was torn to pieces, any more than we can know anything about these groups – shrouded in nostalgia and lingering resentment in equal measure. The best we can do is continue to ask what it is they mean for us, why and how we choose to tell their story. And this intelligent, enjoyable little piece does an excellent job of that.

Till 1 March 2009