Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen established their reputation with The Exonerated, a dramatic study of wrongly convicted inmates on Death Row.

Aftermath reasserts their interest in the documentary possibilities of theatre.

This verbatim performance is part of the London International Festival of Theatre and is a product of the New York Theatre Workshop. It’s the fruit of interviews with Iraqis who have fled the conflict in their country and started new lives in Jordan.

The characters are initially presented to us by Shahid, a translator who is engagingly played by Fajer Al-Kaisi. His role as a linguistic and cultural go-between is intriguingly precarious.
Shahid introduces a pharmacist whose nephew has been killed by American troops, a theatre director who spars enjoyably with his artistic wife, and an imam who insists that the guns found at his mosque have been set aside for purely defensive use. 

Their stories and several others, told courteously though with a mounting vehemence, are neatly interwoven. The material could do with being more varied but the result is a corrective to the all-too-common indifference to the plight of Iraqi citizens whose homes and hearts have been ravaged by war. We’re struck by the characters’ courage and genuine affection for the land that they’ve left behind. 

Blank, who directs, has created a satisfying intimacy and there are attractive performances throughout, with Amir Arison especially striking as a playboy dermatologist who models himself on Tom Cruise and Richard Gere. 

However, it seems misguided to stage Aftermath in a dank vault beneath Waterloo Station, where the actors have to make themselves heard above the thunderous movement of trains overhead.

A fanciful explanation would be that the background noise suggests the sound of nearby explosions. In practice, it simply compromises the piece’s effectiveness.
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