Lidless, the powerful new play by Asian-American playwright Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, is aptly titled, if only because it lifts the lid on the dark-festering wounds left by the crimes committed by the USA at its Guantanamo Bay prison. Cowhig's work, which packs enough action into its 70-minute timeframe to make for two full-length dramas, crackles with intensity and conflict from start to finish. It is also a complex play which digs deep into character and situation, making the audience think as much as it feels. It was certainly the best thing I saw at the 2010 Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Director Steven Atkinson has cleverly directed the piece, placing it on stage at the Underbelly Pasture Theater and requiring the small audience to sit on tiny stools in a kind of corrugated shed which resembles a cell at Gitmo. The actors perform just inches from the audience, making for an intense, visceral kind of intimacy.
The story, essentially a series of mounting confrontations, unfolds swiftly and pungently, thanks to Cowhig's crisp, staccato-like dialogue.
We meet Alice (Penny Layden, superb), a former interrogator at Gitmo, now married to Lucas (Christian Bradley) and the mother of a teenager Rhiannon (Greer Dale-Foulkes). All three are flawed, vulnerable souls whose tenuous links to each other are tested when Bashir (the marvellous Antony Bunsee) shows up, fifteen years after he was imprisoned at Gitmo as a suspected terrorist.
Bashir was ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing and released by the USA, but he hasn't forgotten the harsh, brutal way he was treated by his captors - especially by Alice and her sidekick, an Iraqi-born army doctor named Riva (Nathalie Armin).
Lidless sheds an uncompromising light on the sordid, disgraceful things that took place at Gitmo - and on the physical and psychic damage inflicted on all those who spent time there. Myriad dark, long-buried psycho-sexual secrets are exhumed - and examined - with startling and shattering results.
