Remember Carlo Giuliani? He was the 23-year-old shot dead by Italian police in last summer's G8 summit in Genoa. That death, and the events surrounding it, are the subject of this short, urgent and impassioned play by Fausto Paravidino (himself only 25), which launches a number of works on human rights in the Theatre Upstairs, presented as part of the Royal Court's international playwrights season.
As always, theatre acquires an extra resonance when it deals with the real world. Paravidino's play not only refreshes our memory of the Genoese tragedy but argues, with total conviction, that it was both anticipated and even orchestrated by Silvio Berlusconi.
Eighteen thousand extra police were drafted into Genoa, 200 body bags were ordered, the carabinieri were seen in contact with a violent anarchist group called Black Bloc, and, when an aide passed on information about the shooting to Berlusconi, he was heard significantly to say, "The death has occurred." Any lingering suspicion that all this might be left-wing paranoia is confounded by the brutal police assault on sleeping activists in a Genoese school on the final day of the summit.
Paravidino's 40-minute play, translated by Gillian Hanna and drawing on an article in La Repubblica, states its case with cogency and passion. Far from putting the entire blame on the police, it also implies that they were simply following the policy of Berlusconi's centre-right government.
The case is so strong that it doesn't need hotting up theatrically. Simon McBurney's production is presented as a staged reading, with six very good actors including Juliet Stevenson and Jasper Britton standing behind lecterns. And yet it uses all kinds of extra devices, including audience interjections, Bush and Blair soundbites and a climactic film montage intercutting shots of bleeding demonstrators with the summiteers serenely conferring in the ducal palace. I would have preferred something a little more neutral, since the evidence presented by Paravidino that Giuliani's was a death foretold is itself overwhelming.
Ends tonight. Box office: 020-7565 5000.