Review: Terror at the Lyric

2 STARS, June 23 – July 15. Richard Davies votes for an early exit from Terror at the Lyric Hammersmith, the play where the audience gets to choose the ending. Booking until 15 July

Imagine you’re the curtain operator of a theatre company. It's a suffocatingly hot evening in a theatre with no air conditioning. The play is tedious and didactic, a translation of a German courtroom drama written by a man whose grandfather was head of the Hitler Youth. Some audience members at the back start to exit after only twenty minutes, but many others are trapped in the stalls. Would you bring the curtain down early, causing personal distress to the director and actors, but sparing further suffering for the audience? Press 1 for “Yes” and 2 for “No” on your keypad.

This summarises my evening at the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith to see Terror by Ferdinand von Schirach, a popular German writer of legal dramas whose grandfather did in fact receive 20 years for crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg war trials. The actual play (not a true story) is about an air force pilot, Major Lars Koch, who has been ordered to “divert” a commercial aeroplane hijacked by terrorists with 164 people on board.

But when the plane suddenly shifts course towards a football stadium where 70,000 people are watching an England-Germany football match (audience suffering on an even greater scale), he independently decides to shoot the plane out of the sky. For deviating from his mission and choosing the “lesser evil’, Koch is now on trial for 164 counts of murder. The gimmick is that the audience gets to play jury and decide how the play will end.

According to the billing, Terror has become a “global phenomenon” since it opened in Berlin in 2015. There is even a website that charts audience reactions. Of 1,063 productions in 7 countries, 91.7% have resulted in “not guilty” verdicts, including all 8 of the productions so far at the Lyric. Fascinatingly, only in Japan do the audiences always seem to find the pilot guilty. I would love to know why.

My main difficulty was that I felt I’d seen more absorbing trials on jury service and that’s a pretty low bar. The play is based on the German judicial system, where the judge is irritatingly active, which is altogether much less fun than the English system where you have barristers battling against each other. (Ironically, there’s actually no such thing as a jury trial in Germany.)

Terror has so little drama that it feels at times more like a documentary re-enactment. Only two witnesses are called. One – supposedly a senior ranking military officer – ends his testimony by asking the Judge how to claim his witness expenses. You couldn’t imagine any senior member of the British armed forces showing such appalling lack of judgment. The other witness has barely any more impact on the proceedings, in spite of being the widow of a man killed on the plane.

At times, the counsels for the prosecution and defence refer to obscure philosophical arguments to make a point about the pilot’s guilt or innocence. On each occasion, I expected someone to shout “objection!” and for the judge to say “stick to the facts please Counsel!” But that never happened.

Somewhere, there’s a great idea here, but the problem is simply that the play is dull and the best efforts of the actors could do nothing to disguise that.

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