The Time of Our Lies: The Life and Times of Howard Zinn

At its best, theatre can offer a vital way of accessing history in the present. Animated on stage, historical events can speak to contemporary issues, sparking a lively and often surprising dialogue. When theatre becomes little more than a history lesson, however, the past feels more like a different country than ever.

The Time of Our Lies treads a precarious line between the two, attempting to use history to instruct and galvanise, while at the same time injecting it with a theatrical thrill. Touching on conflicts from World War II to Iraq, its unifying thread is historian Howard Zinn, whose anti-war stance was triggered by his experiences as a bombardier in the US Army Air Force. His words pepper Bianca Bagatourian’s text, offering a springboard for sequences of song and movement.

It certainly doesn’t want for ideas: the injustices of the battlefield, the mechanisation and dissociation of warfare, the use of God as justification for war, conflict as media-fuelled entertainment. The show is also armed with a barrage of different styles and techniques – distractingly so. Despite brief blasts of brilliance, it feels as though the company are still frantically throwing stuff at the wall and waiting to see what sticks.

With fewer clashing aesthetics and more attention to its structure, The Time of Our Lies could be a powerful piece, and it still might be with further development. But sadly the political anger of the show’s impulse gets smothered by all the different tactics it employs along the way.