Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Nick Birkinshaw.
Supported by Mark Lea, Hannah Plant, Jack Cooper, Warren Tutt, Joe Ball, Thoma Galashan, Jake Barrowcliffe, Michael Coumas, Bethany Sprontson, Jade Thomson, Ewan Pollitt, Jamie Barton, Sam Williams.
If you keep your wits about you, you will not be harmed. If you keep the information that you hold to yourself and don’t give into the piercing stare, the charm and easy smile of the interrogator then you will have avoided The Judgement of Hakim. Find yourself in left wing book shop, too late, he knows and you’re on a list, read right wing literature, he knows and you’re on a list, buy a certain food, on a list, in fact anything you do in life is listed and what you hold as freedom is just purely an illusion but vital to the trade of the interrogator.
As Hakim tells the audience, with his attendants close by, scrutinising, watching, writing down any possible point of interest about you, you did not choose to come, they choose you, with the right type of bombarded information, the right phrase and subliminal message, perhaps on a television screen, they got you to come and confess your greatest secret.
Written by Andrew Sherlock, wonderfully directed by Mark Smith of the highly rated Spike Theatre and performed by Nick Birkinshaw, The Judgement of Hakim takes the art of interrogation and boils it down to the point where like Stockholm Syndrome you start to feel the urge to have empathy, a cordial honest relationship with the person who has taken your life whilst all the time the smile of a man whose charm hides what will happen to you when and if the powers that be decide enough is enough and to let the more violent approach take root.
With the focus of attention shifting between Nick Birkinshaw’s interrogator, the screams of the accused off stage and the persistent cycle of pictures on an overhead screen showing images of family and destruction, the audience is made to feel enticingly uncomfortable about where the judgement will actually stop. Nick Birkinshaw throughout it all smiles, like a gracious serpent holding out your redemption, the quality of his delivery never once falters, a true lesson in the art of holding an audience’s attention.
The Judgement of Hakim is not to be avoided, resist?….why would you? It is a superb piece of writing that gets underneath the skin of who you are, what you would fear when the kick of the black leather boot is at your door. Nick Birkinshaw is a revelation. A tremendous and chilling evening of theatre!
Ian D. Hall