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Nicholas Kent |
Camden feature | Victims of Torture | Torture team at Tricycle Theatre | Director Nicholas Kent
UNDER a national crisis,” says Spencer Tracy in his summary at the end of the 1961 film Judgement at Nuremberg, “ordinary, even able and extraordinary men can delude themselves into the commission of crimes so vast and heinous that they beggar the imagination.”
Incapacitated by flu and channel-surfing the afternoon dross, Philippe Sands was struck by Tracy’s powerful condemnation of four German judges. To the human rights lawyer, the parallels with the Bush administration seemed impossible to ignore. Now Sands is ensuring that no one else can ignore it either.
Torture Team, his book exploring the legal wranglings and moral turpitude of US Defence Department lawyers, hit the shelves last week; next week the stage version featuring Vanessa Redgrave, Joanna Lumley, local actors Bill Hoyland and Sally Giles comes to the Tricycle Theatre. Lawyer Clive Stafford Smith narrates.
Sands, who lives with his family in Hampstead and has represented various detainees at Guantanamo Bay, is convinced of the “conscious decision at the top” to violate basic human rights in the interrogation techniques used on suspected insurgents at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib.
He reserves “his strongest ire” for them, but believes responsibility must also be laid at the feet of their advocates.
“The people at the top remain strongly committed to abuse and unnecessary torture,” he says. “I focus on the lawyers because that’s the world that I know, but it’s a crucial level because once you get the lawyers on board it’s going to happen.
“I disagreed with what they had done but understanding the circumstances in which they – the people at the bottom subject to intense pressure from Washington – were put. I felt I had to try to understand.”
He and Nicholas Kent, the director of the Tricycle, who worked with Sands on last year’s The Indictment of Tony Blair, distilled the book into an hour-long play. Although Sands plays himself, he admits he is daunted by the stellar company.
Like Sands, Kent takes an absolutist view on opposing torture.
“It’s been more or less proven that all torture does is lead to false convictions,” he says. “Under the Geneva Convention people shouldn’t be put under any duress to answer questions.
“This play is about where the line is drawn.”
SIMON WROE
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