Shrapnel: 34 Fragments of a Massacre

The ‘fragments’ of Anders Lustgarten’s provocative new play are a bitter reference to the 34 villagers blown apart by a US-led drone strike on a mountain pass between Turkey and Iraq in 2011. There were only a handful of survivors from the group wrongly identified as Kurdish terrorists, who were in fact farmers smuggling diesel on donkeys. It was one of many shocking episodes in the so-called War on Terror and Lustgarten’s play looks at the network of people who were complicit in this particular example. He indicts mendacious politicians, obfuscating arms dealers and supine journalists who gloss the truth and co-produce the excuses.

Lustgarten is right to assert that there is sometimes only one side to a story; this certainly justifies his invective directed at weapons manufacturers who speak of nail bombs ‘maximising ground clearance’. Even more emotional engagement might have been possible if the moral dilemmas in the play were more incisively drawn. As it is, Lustgarten sticks to a victim/perpetrator format with cynical ideologues crushing simple, vulnerable country folk. This may be how it was, but it doesn’t challenge our passive complicity as supposed beneficiaries of this lethal political matrix.

Mehmet Ergen’s production serves in large part as a remembrance of the 34 dead, recounting anecdotes about the ordinariness of their lives. But these are thoughtfully mixed with different perspectives including an arms pitch, a torture scene and drone video footage blurrily representing the victims inching along the mountain pass to their sudden violent deaths. Anthony Lamble’s set with Turkish surtitles on TV screens is otherwise spartan, leaving the ensemble of six to use it as a kind of mausoleum, presenting snapshots from the atrocity.