A Human Being Died That Night at Upstream Theater

Prime Evil is what South Africans call him: a paid white political assassin currently serving two life sentences for crimes committed in the name of the apartheid state. In Nicholas Wright’s play, based on the best-selling 2003 book by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a black female psychologist (Olivier Award winner Noma Dumezweni) enters Eugene de Kock’s (Matthew Marsh) prison cell to discern man from government-sanctioned monster. In a riveting interrogation that moves from dispassionate to deeply intimate, a remorseful de Kock and his interlocutor negotiate a fraught emotional space in which fear and compassion coexist.