How a hate crime turned into a campaigning work of art

The homophobic murder of Matthew Shepard shocked America. But can a play which examines the killing help ease a nation's troubled conscience, asks Veronica Lee

Small-town USA, the early hours of 7 October 1998. Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay student at the University of Wyoming, was found beaten, pistol-whipped and left for dead after being lashed to a fence in the hills outside Laramie, the victim of a fatal hate crime by two men of his own age. He died five days later, another statistic of America's violent society. But, alone among the dozens of killings that happened that night, this was a murder that troubled a nation's conscience.

Watching TV footage of the news and the trial (both murderers received life sentences) at home in New York, playwright Moises Kaufman sensed that the events in Wyoming, America's least populous and most law-abiding state, would be a catalyst for change in the US. He discussed the story with members of his theatre company and one month later they went to Laramie to interview 200 townspeople – family, friends, co-students, teachers, police officers and church ministers – about the murder.

They recorded more than 400 hours of tape and Kaufman edited them down to 90 minutes. The result, The Laramie Project, is a play with 79 characters played by eight actors who tell the story of how this heinous crime affected a tight-knit community. It played off-Broadway, stunned audiences at the Edinburgh Fringe last year and is now about to open in London.

Its director for the off-West End production, at the Cochrane Theatre, is Linda Ames Key, a high-school drama teacher from New York. She worked with Kaufman as he developed The Laramie Project and was determined to have her Greenwich Academy students in Connecticut perform the play. "This story was so incredible, so powerfully told," she says. "I knew straightaway that I wanted to do this with young people." After initial doubts by some colleagues and parents in the Waspish commuter town of Greenwich, it was performed to enthusiastic audiences and has inspired more than 400 other high schools, so far, to follow suit.

Key's London production is by the original Greenwich Academy cast that won a Fringe First at Edinburgh last year (they are now all university students, several at Harvard). She says their age has a huge impact on the audience. "This play feels even more powerful when there are youths of 19 or 20 playing the murderers, because you realise how awful it is to have a young person commit such a crime." While some are studying drama, few cast members know if their future is in the theatre. But Key says their lack of drama-school training is a bonus. "There is an intensity and purity to their performances and not a huge amount of actors' tricks, so you really hear what they are saying."

I ask Key why Shepard's story had such an impact. "There were groups that were looking for a galvanising event to have hate-crime legislation go through and this was it," she says. "Matthew was a poster boy – he was the perfect child to show a picture of. Every parent wants to have a clean-cut, gorgeous child in college and people felt like Matthew could be their son. People's reaction was that this could happen to them, but it should not happen again."

But does this work as drama? The Laramie Project couldn't be simpler, an almost bare set and the actors directly addressing the audience, while Kaufman provides a narrative by breaking down the many elements of the story into "moments" – the murderers, the facts, the word "gay". It is incredibly effective and affecting at the same time.

While Shepard's is a tragic American story – middle-class college boy targeted by ill-educated rednecks – there are British parallels; the murders of black youth Stephen Lawrence in south London in 1993 and Kurdish asylum-seeker Firsat Dag in Glasgow in 2001, are two hate crimes that hit the headlines, but others – assaults and verbal abuse against gay men and women, and ethnic and religious minorities – happen every day in the UK, unrecorded and unremarkable in their frequency.

Brutal murders have provided source material for British playwrights, too – James Bulger's for The Age of Consent by Peter Morris, the Moors murders for And All the Children Cried by Judith Jones and Beatrix Campbell, and the killing of Stephen Lawrence for The Colour of Justice by Richard Norton-Taylor.

Most plays that use real-life murders as their starting point face the perhaps inevitable criticism that they exploit the bereaved, or that they have sympathy with the murderers. But as Peter Morris pointed out when his play was lambasted by some at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2001, even the most vicious crimes must be put into context – with examinations of motives and the societies and cultures that produce such killers. "I'm happy to speak on their [Robert Thompson and Jon Venables'] behalf, when they would risk their lives if they chose to speak for themselves," Morris said. "And I must assert the right, even the necessity, of dealing with such subjects in drama. A tragedy of this proportion is what theatre can only help to heal, by promoting imaginative sympathies."

Perhaps the most powerful aspect of The Laramie Project is that it never descends into polemic and does not make a judgment about those whose story it tells. Shepard and his killers are not presented in simplistic, good-and-evil terms; the killers are spoken of (by one character at least) as "good kids", while Shepard's HIV-positive status is revealed during another character's very moving story. Says Key: "Life's never that simple. You have to know what the other side feels in order to know how to deal with hate and bigotry."

Over six years into a Labour government, Section 28 – which bans the "promotion" of homosexuality in schools – is still on the statute books in England. Yet, ironically, The Laramie Project is performed by school children all over the deeply conservative US. Even Key is amazed at its success, but says: "You must remember that there is a huge section of America which believes that if we speak out, if we talk, then change can be effected and that we can make a difference."

'The Laramie Project': Cochrane Theatre, London WC1 (020 7269 1606) Tuesday to 6 April