Review: Our Brother – Play, Pie & A Pint

Jack MacGregor’s fascination with global socio-economic flashpoints takes him back to 1970s Cambodia with Our Brother, a dramatisation of Scottish academic Malcolm Caldwell’s final day.

It’s a tale told by award-winning journalist Elizabeth Becker, played with heart and hard-nosed grit by Nicole Cooper. Becker accompanied Caldwell on that ill-fated expedition to Kampuchea, as Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge briefly renamed it. In the red glow of a darkroom safelight, she goes back over the final hours of December 23rd, 1978, searching for the motives behind Caldwell’s murder.

Bobby Bradley steps into the doomed academic’s shoes, embodying bright-eyed evangelical enthusiasm for Pot’s ‘communist utopia’ with infuriating naivety. Director Andrea Ling lets the sparks fly when he and the clearer-sighted Becker discuss the blatant signs of mass atrocities all around them. MacGregor finds the root of his demise in her ultimate success in persuading him to at least question Pot’s virtues.

Emotive but monotone

It falls to David Lee-Jones to create Pot, or ‘Brother Number One’ as he styled himself, for the stage. Charming yet petulant, and convinced of his absolute righteousness, he beckons Caldwell into his presence as a spider would a fly. From the start, MacGregor has Caldwell play the useful idiot to Pot’s charismatic, yet morally and intellectually bankrupt, tyrant. Their first meeting makes for a grimace-inducing, somewhat amusing watch, before questions illicit truths he isn’t prepared to handle during their second.

MacGregor sends the academic into a full-bodied crisis, destroyed by inescapable dissonance between his life’s work and the reality of the regime he has championed for so long. It’s a fairly simple reading of events which creates a logical reason for his extermination; narratively satisfactory, but lacking the confounding muddle which attended the true events behind the play.

A solid story, well-told

Such simplicity does help this well-paced journey into disaster sit comfortably in a lunch hour, but at the price of a rather black and white rehashing of history. This Caldwell is rather stupid until he’s not, whilst Becker plays Cassandra to his resolute self-deception. Conversely, this Pol Pot stares at his crimes with psychopathic dispassion, a fully signed-up advocate for ‘the greater good’ as he sees it. The three play out their drama more akin to history’s summary judgment of their characters than complicated, frustrating, messy human beings.

Even so, Our Brother is still a solid story, well-told and played with absolute gusto by a trio of talented performers. Taken in isolation, Our Brother is an absorbing, compact politically-edged tragedy. Each actor acts according to their own philosophies, making rational choices, however deluded, wicked, or obviously sensible. Disaster is inevitable – if only life were so simple.