What can you say about an act of terrorism committed more than thirty years ago? Hasn’t everything already been said?
For Annie Lareau the answer to that is no. The friends she lost in what remains the deadliest terrorist attack in UK history were not just names and numbers; she wants to remember them as the people who were, and still are, so important to her.
Annie is now an acclaimed actor. Fuselage is her story, but it is also the story of all of her friends who died in that attack. By focusing not on their deaths but on their young, vital, exuberant lives, Annie has created perhaps the most moving piece of theatre you will see in this year’s Fringe.
On the night of 21 December 1988 Pan Am flight 103 exploded over the small Scottish town of Lockerbie. The flight had left Heathrow less than an hour before, heading for New York, two of the stops on the route from Frankfurt to Detroit. Many of its passengers were students from Syracuse University, in London on a Study Abroad programme and now returning home to spend Christmas with their families.
There were no survivors of the crash. Eleven Lockerbie residents were also killed as parts of the plane plummeted to the ground.
Annie had wanted to take that flight. She had a booking for the next day but tried to change it so that she could travel with her friends. The cost of making the change was £75. She could not afford that, so she waved her friends off from their Portobello Road flat and went on with her packing.
Fuselage is performed by Annie and two fellow actors, Brenda Joyner and Peter Dylan O’Connor. Joyner and O’Connor each take several parts and Annie plays herself.
As we enter the theatre, photos of some of the people who died, of the aftermath of the crash, the police, the press, the lines of coffins and the Memorial Garden in Lockerbie are shown on a screen. Music plays, Total Eclipse of the Heart, FAME! – I want to live forever (‘I want to light up the sky…’). The stage is set with plastic chairs, with strings of them also hanging from the ceiling.
Fuselage skilfully draws several strands together. We see the young Annie arriving at Syracuse, meeting her soon to be best friend Theo(dora) Cohen and settling into her drama course. We see present day Annie, travelling with her daughter to Lockerbie to meet Colin Dorrance, the then 18-year-old policeman who was first on the scene of the crash, and who will now show her where her friends died. And we learn about the causative events that began two years before those friends boarded Flight 103.
The minute Annie turns up for her classes, she knows she has met a kindred spirit. Theo is tiny, ‘a small scrappy girl’ and Theo introduces her friend Geoffrey, another theatre student. There is a hilarious scene in which the three of them act out 1980s student life; psychedelic glasses, shoulder pads, scrunchies. Geoffrey smokes a joint and airplays a chair, they all dance around the stage. In class they endure calisthenics and vocal warmups. Annie moves to the others’ floor in the dorm; they drink, they party. They do everything together, love the good bits, laugh about the others. They are having the time of their lives.
Meanwhile a Swiss businessman is selling timers to Libya. A bomb blows up a discotheque in Berlin. President Regan authorises retaliatory air strikes on Libya. Frankfurt airport employs a criminal as its security manager. An investigation notes numerous security lapses at the airport; a screening scanner is found to be malfunctioning but is kept in use. Pan Am prioritises its profits and refuses to hire more security staff, while charging each of its passengers a $5 ‘security surcharge’.
The Syracuse students know nothing about any of this. It’s Christmas, they put up decorations and hang earrings on a spindly tree. They and their friends apply to spend the Fall semester in London. Annie starts to have nightmares about planes crashing and airports catching fire. They terrify her. Is she going to die on a plane?
There is a tremendous warmth around all three of these excellent actors. The close friendship between the students is totally convincing. The optimism and energy of youth radiates from them as they bounce from one thing to the next, hardly pausing for breath. Theo is especially lively, always up for anything, taking any chances that come her way, and already very successful in her field.
There are so many poignant moments, small details that will later form such precious memories. Annie and Theo’s adventures in Greece, the group’s weekend in Paris and Christmas shopping in London.
Annie’s nightmares continue.
On 21 December Theo and friends head for Heathrow, squashed into two taxis. A few hours later their plane falls out of the sky.
In present time, Annie meets Colin and his neighbour Josephine. Josephine was one of a group of women who washed, ironed and stored every scrap of clothing recovered from the scene. The humanity and kindness shown by the people of Lockerbie, even in the midst of their own tragedy, will never be forgotten. Personal possessions were scattered over the town – handbags, cards, Christmas presents.
And by now the audience feels it knows the young people who packed those bags, wrapped those gifts. The detail of Annie’s writing has made them real for us. These are the people who danced together, stayed up all night together, hanging their earrings on a Christmas tree.
The aftermath of the bombing is a further hell for Annie. Syracuse’s London office asks her to go through their list of students and mark the names of anyone whom she knows to have been on the flight. The press hounds her. She has an agonising call with Theo’s mother. She is consumed by guilt. Her relationships with men become toxic; she wants them to hurt her, to take away the greater pain. It has taken her many years to recover from ‘a deep-seated self-hatred’.
Fuselage ends on a note of cautious hope. Annie and Geoffrey are still friends; their lives are intertwined. When Annie finally opens Theo’s box in the Pan Am archive at Syracuse, she finds an earring she had lent to her friend as she left for the airport,
‘A little bit of me had been with her through the sky, the fire, and the silence.’
I am sure that there were few dry eyes in the house at the end of Sunday’s performance. All three actors in Fuselage are outstanding, but it is the strength of Annie Lareau’s writing, and the immense courage and personal commitment she shows on stage, that elevate this play to stellar heights.
‘The victims are names, barely acknowledged. They belonged to us…’
By writing and performing this stunning play, Annie has honoured her friends and shown them to be so much more than victims; she has celebrated their lives, and invited us to celebrate them with her. As someone who remembers Lockerbie, I was far more affected by Fuselage than by all the news reports at the time. Then, everything seemed somehow distant; now at last it is real, and our hearts break for all those lost lives, and for the people they left behind.
Fuselage is at Pleasance Courtyard (Above), 60 Pleasance (Venue 33) at 3.45pm every day until 25 August. Please note that there are no shows on Wednesday 13 and Tuesday 19 August.
