Blow-up: David Benson is quietly devasting as Jim Swire in "Lockerbie: Unfinished Business" Pic: Stve Ullathorne
What a pity US Senators tend not to attend the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It would be fascinating to see how Robert Menendez, the New Jersey Senator who has been making the most noise about the release of the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Al Megrahi, reacted to this show. For this version of events, and the stacking of the evidence. which forms the core both of this show and of Jim Swire's forthcoming book, co-written with Peter Biddulph, give a very different picture from the official one.
Swire is the GP whose response to losing his much loved daughter Flora on Pan Am 103 in 1988 has been to make it his life work to find out what really happened that fateful night. Like just about every other journalist in Scotland, I have met Swire. David Benson, who plays him here in this one man show cast in the from of a public lecture, neither looks nor sounds remotely like him.
But Benson captures almost uncannily Swire’s dogged determination, his very English self-control in the face of a thousand snubs from the authorities, his quiet courage (this is a man who went to meet Colonel Gaddafi when the UK didn’t even have an embassy in Tripoli) and, most of all, his slow burning fury at the catalogue of incompetence, lies, misinformation and innuendo which still swirls around what remains the worst terrorist attack on British soil.
Using much material already on the public record, Benson/Swire lays out the evidence for the Iran connection; the motive (namely the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by the USS Vincennes earlier that same year), the bomb-making factory that was found in Germany with identical devices in tape recorders, the cotemporaneous payments from Iranian sources to known terrorists – and compares it to the increasingly discredited evidence which was actually heard in court and which convicted Al Megrahi.
He and director Hannah Eidinow deliberately keep the emotional temperature low; with evidence like this, they imply, who needs rhetorical flourishes? It makes the occasional moment when he does pause to get his emotions under control, as he talks about Flora, all the more effective. I am no lawyer, but as a piece of theatre, it is, in its restraint and measured poise, devastatingly effective.
Lockerbie: Unfinished Business. Gilded Balloon, until Aug 30; 0131 622 6552
