A Conversation With My Father

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He’s a left-leaning retired career copper troubled by the memory of having to raise his truncheon on rioters. She’s a professor and activist with a passion for protesting. When this father and daughter converse, in a manner of speaking, in Hannah Nicklin’s solo spoken-word piece embellished with slides and audio recordings, it’s an idiosyncratic, touching and thought-provoking thing.

Nicklin’s academic area of interest is theatre and politics. Her play essentially asks whether art can be a force for change just as powerful, if not more so, than direct action. As she very straightforwardly discusses her thoughts and feelings on the importance and ethics of marching and the fearful experience of being 'kettled', her father—his voice taped from when Nicklin interviewed him for her PHD—provides an illuminatingly thoughtful insider’s perspective on the boys in blue; an atypical, openly philosophical cop discussing how conscience-testing his duties could be (policing the miner's strike in the 1980s for example). But on another, simpler level, this is a story about a daughter and her dad, and the deep love and respect the two share despite being on opposite sides of the fight, as it were.

The narrative jumps around too often to feel consistently powerful and engrossing, but Nicklin lucidly makes an important point. Just as protestors aren’t all pacifistic sweethearts (“some protestors are dicks”), neither are all cops dehumanised brutes. When sides in a struggle are less polarised than you’d imagine, the best sort of protest, she supposes, works not on someone’s mind, but on their soul.