Theatre review: Another World: Losing Our Children to Islamic State - 'enlightens but rarely catches fire'

Another World: Losing Our Children to Islamic State, Temporary Theatre, National Theatre

Nabil Elouahabi in Another World: Losing Our Children to Islamic State at the Temporary Theatre, NT (Tristram Kenton)

The subject – why Islamic State has a fatal appeal for some young European Muslims – could scarcely be more urgent and director Nicolas Kent and writer Gillian Slovo are a dream team at exploring controversial issues (Guantanamo, the 2011 riots) through verbatim documentary theatre. But this starkly staged, 90-minute piece feels strangely below par. It enlightens, but it rarely catches fire as drama.

The strongest strands are those involving people most individually affected. We hear the piercing testimony of three ordinary, not-especially-religious Belgian mothers who are left distraught with guilt, fear and impotent love after their children manage to steal away to fight in Syria. A lively group of Muslim sixth-formers from Tower Hamlets in London talk about the pressures that come from being made the object of suspicion after every atrocity.

Along with exploring the question of what makes a European teenager leave the safety of home to join this horrifically violent organisation (the attraction of false utopian hopes to those searching for a sense of identity and belonging?), the play seeks to place the idea of global Jihad in a historical context (specifically the Cold War politics that helped to foster it) and to discuss how best to combat the phenomenon without falling into the illiberalising traps Isis has laid. All admirable aims – but it results here in a surfeit of experts who sound as if they are trying remember the academic papers they recently delivered. Disappointing.

To 7 May