Just War

A one-off performance at Theatre in the Mill

Just War was created in two weeks as a response to the Gulf war. The material was taken from news reports and information from Bradford University’s Peace Studies department. Third Theatre were between productions, the show was unfunded, but the company wanted to express their feelings and try to understand the truth of what was happening. It was felt we were not getting the whole truth and there was a lot of blatant propaganda and jingoism around. It seemed as if oil was the reason and that did not seem enough of a reason to bomb people.

The show was a personal response from the company to the information we had and our opinions about war and power. We were joined by other poets and performers on the evening of the show who performed their own responses. The show was proof that the Third Theatre devising process was a robust method of creating as a group from diverse material. In two weeks we had created a show we could be proud of.

Our publicity was hastily put together on a very small budget. The day of the performance it snowed badly, and we wondering if we would have an audience. It seemed however that people were eager to engage with a dialogue about this war and from all over Bradford, people walked to the theatre through thick snow. The auditorium was packed to capacity I remember steam rising from snow dampened jackets as an excited audience waited for the start. It seemed to me at the time that this was theatre’s real role reacting to the zietgiest, creating discussion and asking questions in the moment in real time face-to-face with the audience. There was something almost Shakespearian about the event, a new play commenting on the events that were in the newspapers that day. I thought, if only we could find funding to do this, research and respond to create theatre of a high integrity relevant to the community in which we live.

As a one off, there were no reviews or photographs. Yet I think it was one of our most exciting and important shows.