I’m currently making final preparations for Monday’s auditions for the 22nd July Project. A bit of a first for me this – I’ve been wanting to do a piece of theatre about the de Menezes killing ever since it happened, but at this point I’m still not really sure what the piece is going to include. It’s kind of the nice thing about the workshop setting but, unsurprisingly perhaps, it’s a slightly scary feeling. This is compounded by an uneasy feeling at the back of my mind that maybe I’m not the person who’s supposed to be running this project; that somehow it’s arrogant or wrong of me to be trying to bring this whole thing together. This is one of the occupational hazards of directing, I’ve learnt already — the job by its very nature involves opening yourself up to accusations of arrogance. But it’s certainly more this time round, possibly because there’s no playwright or script to hide behind. Although we have a writer on board – the brilliant Dawn King – it’s me that’s initiated this whole thing, that’s calling actors in to audition for a piece that may or may not exist.
So why am I doing this? Why does the world need a play about the death of Jean Charles de Menezes? I’ve always believed that a theatre is a place where people come together to talk about issues and ideas, hopes, fears – the things that penetrate through to the life of a community. In London that’s a strange and rather confusing idea – where is the community? In a multicultural, international city, what are the things that link us together? One of those things in this city is the Tube, a levelling factor that brings together people of all kinds of ethnic and social backgrounds. While there are things about all of us that are different, and that often we don’t like about each other, we accept each other’s right to live and work in London, and in order to live and work we need to travel. De Menezes’ death was bizarre because he was a normal Londoner on his way to a perfectly normal job. But because a terrorist’s gym registration card mentioned another residence at Jean’s address, he was followed by surveillance officers and a chain of events was started that ended in his death. Recent leaks from the IPCC report on Jean’s death suggest that he was positively identified by surveillance officers as the terrorist they were supposed to be following; looking at the photos of de Menezes and Hussein Osman, the terrorist suspect, if the police could have made that mistake they could make the same error with practically anyone. So it’s a small link with someone involved in terrorism, plus evidently a whole chain of mistakes, that leads to a killing by officers who seem to have genuinely thought the man was a clear and present threat to the community. Hardly anyone who lives in this city can be more than two or three degrees of separation away from someone connected with July 7th or 21st; so it seems to me just possible that, in the climate of fear and confusion just after the attacks, what happened to Jean could have happened to just about anyone.
Secondly, the media response to Jean’s death was so bizarre. First of all we had apparently conclusive reports that a sucide bomber had been shot; eyewitnesses saying they’d seen someone wearing a thick coat, trailing wires, jumping over barriers etc. How and why did those reports come about? Did people see what they wanted to see? Were they scared and confused by the presence of so many armed police? What about the police spokespeople? Sir Ian Blair, commissioner of the Met, says he didn’t know de Menezes was an innocent man until the following day. Why not?
Thirdly, the range of opinion unleashed about Jean’s death has been so incredibly broad — from seeing him as a victim of governmental oppression to the idea that he somehow “deserved it” because he’d outstayed his visa. What’s the truth, if that’s something we can know?
And that’s just the start. I guess the thing that really makes me want to do this is, I was living in Stockwell at the time. As it happens I drove to rehearsal that day, but I could have been on that Tube another day. So there’s a personal connection for me, even if it’s a very remote one. It’s a question of how we can live in a society together with the threat of violence hanging over us constantly.
