Review: US/THEM, National Theatre

On 1 September 2004, 32 terrorists entered Beslan School Number One and held hostage over 1000 of its occupants (mainly women and children) in the gymnasium. As the siege progressed, the world looked on in horror as even water was denied to the captives despite the intense heat and tightly packed space. To those of us with children, the school environment and the suffering of its pupils, brought such indescribable cruelty very close to home. On the third day, Russian special forces stormed the building but, with bombs rigged to explode in so confined a space and terrorists armed to the teeth with no mind to their own safety, the casualty count was more than 300.

In 2013 writer, Carly Wijs, was asked by Belgian theatre company, BRONKS, to produce a work for a young audience and Us/Them, her imagining of this unimaginable event, is the product, showing now at the National Theatre having won praise at this year's Edinburgh Festival.

Wijs pulls her focus tightly on to two kids, a boy and a girl, teens like any others, proud of their school, calculating cash sums by working out how many iPods they equate to and bashful about removing a shirt in public, even in the hellish heat. Gytha Parmenentier and Roman Van Houtven tell their story in appropriately slightly accented English, explaining the terrorists' rota that ensured the booby trap bombs' pressure switch detonator always had one foot on it and how the hallucinations kick in once the dehydration crowds out any other feeling.

Both are good as narrators, but excel in the movement that suffuses the play, a dramatic counterpoint to the hostages' actual incarceration. Parmentier and Van Houtven leap and duck as they pull strings to zigzag across the stage, at once representing the gymnasium's function as a prison in which movement was forbidden, but also facilitating the illustration of how the human spirit wriggled through such physical bonds, particularly as they speak of what was on their minds. Likewise, the bombs are represented as helium-filled balloons, tugging at gravity, longing to be away, to soar harmlessly into the sky. The terrorists trapped their hostages bodies, but not their souls.

There's backstory too about the ancient ethnic divides that criss-cross the Caucasus region, a crossroads for cultures for millennia, the lines on 21st century maps carrying little weight with the people who live there, separated by prejudice and religion. But this is no geopolitical lecture.

What emerges is a piece sitting somewhere between orthodox theatre and performance art, but nevertheless wholly accessible for audiences young and old. It's a human story about teenagers caught up in an adult quarrel and paying the ultimate price. We recognise those kids, their fears and their dreams, and we smile and wince as their fates unfold. We do them honour in their suffering and lament the loss of their futures and the kids they would be sending to school just about now.

Us/Them continues at the National's Dorfman Theatre until 18 February.

Photo Murdo Macleod.

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