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SUS: METRO **** 4 STARS. Clare Ogden. July 2009
Splice Productions conjure up just the right mood for Barrie Keefe's 30-year-old play, SUS. Vintage newspaper cartoons and old posters for demonstrations adorn the walls, and multiple televisions play footage of election coverage from May 3 1979 - the night the play is set; the eve of Margaret Thatcher's 11-year term as Prime Minister.
Easy-going Delroy is brought down to the police station for questioning; he thinks he's there, for the upteenth time, as a SUS, or a Suspect Under Suspicion, a target on jumped-up charges because he's a black man. Detectives Karn (Robert Gwilym) and Wilby (Jack Wharrier) live up to all our expectations of bigoted men with power: they are infuriatingly obtuse, wilfully cruel, pompous, pedantic and utterly convinced that they're right. Both actors inhabit their parts brilliantly, as does Huss Garbiya in the role of the amused, then confused, then utterly broken Delroy. As it turns out, they've arrested him on suspicion of murdering his own wife. The in-the-round staging is mostly successful, though perhaps inevitably views of key moments are masked for at least part of the audience. The actors need to project more; it's a big space they're performing in. Despite this, the play loses little of its drama. Karn's chilling enthusiasm for a 'new dawn' that will do away with the liberalism he despises still sounds depressingly familiar three decades on.
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