I am currently adapting my book Flightpath to Murder as a stage play called One of Them.
A courtroom drama about individual responsibility in the aftermath of war, in which a British prosecutor discovers that the distinction between “us” and “them” is much less secure than he wants it to be.
Synopsis
What happens when we stop seeing people as individuals and start seeing them as one of them?
In the aftermath of a devastating conflict, a young fighter pilot is captured after his aircraft crashes behind enemy lines. He is beaten and killed by a group of civilians and local officials. Months later, the war is over and the victors must decide how justice should be administered to those responsible.
Captain Robert Drake, a British soldier and trained solicitor, is persuaded to remain in Germany as a war crimes prosecutor. His task appears straightforward: establish what happened to the murdered airman, identify those responsible and bring them before a court.
But the further Drake investigates, the less straightforward the idea of guilt becomes. The accused men claim they were acting under orders. Witnesses disagree about what they saw. Some of those who now condemn the killers were themselves members of the Nazi system. Others insist that they were simply ordinary people who had no choice. And surrounding them are men who believe that, after what Germany has done, justice should be uncompromising.
The murdered pilot had been reduced to a ‘terrorflieger’ – an enemy who, by definition, deserved what happened to him. Yet Drake discovers that the same instinct exists on his own side. His friend Lieutenant Brian Forrest has killed a wounded German soldier, dismissing him as ‘just one of them.’ Suddenly the case is no longer simply about what happened in a German meadow. It is about the dangerous ease with which human beings divide the world into us and them – and what happens when that division becomes a justification for violence.
Drake believes in the rule of law. But his wife and child were killed in a German bombing raid, and beneath his commitment to justice lies a desire for revenge. As the trial progresses, he must confront an uncomfortable possibility: that the instinct to dehumanise an enemy does not belong exclusively to one side.
One of Them uses the aftermath of war to examine questions that remain urgently relevant: Who is responsible when individuals claim they were only following orders? Can justice be impartial when the people administering it have themselves suffered? Does defeating an evil ideology justify abandoning the principles that distinguish its opponents from it? And how easily can the language of us and them turn an individual human being into someone who no longer deserves the same protection as ourselves?
Based on the real 1944 Elten lynching case and the book the book Flightpath to Murder by Steve Darlow, One of Them is a courtroom drama about individual responsibility, collective guilt and the fragile boundary between justice and revenge.
