If you met a genocidal dictator how would you react? For the Scottish academic who is granted an audience with Cambodia’s Pol Pot in Jack MacGregor’s play, the first encounter leaves him blandly upbeat. “He seems quite nice,” he tells his friend, a sceptical American journalist.
His naivety verges on the comic, but the play is at its most gripping when it takes the opinions of this specialist in economic history seriously. Played by Bobby Bradley, and known only as Stranger, he is the author of In Defence of Kampuchea, a paean to the Khmer Rouge, and is predisposed to see the good in policies such as the centralisation of a money-free economy.
