Small Acts of Love – The kindness of strangers

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On 21 December 1988 at approximately 19:02, Pan Am Flight 103 was cruising over Scotland when a bomb exploded, rupturing the aircraft. All 243 passengers, 16 crew, and 11 residents of the small town of Lockerbie were killed as the aircraft crashed onto the town, its jet fuel igniting on impact. The majority of passengers were Americans, travelling home for Christmas. After a long investigation, Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbasset al-Meghrahi was convicted in 2001 for planting the explosive, though his single conviction remains controversial to this day.

37 years later, there has been remarkable amount of interest in the Lockerbie bombing, with two TV series on British television and Small Acts of Love, a new play to celebrate the reopening of Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre. Yet where the TV series focus on the investigation into the bombing and questions of responsibility and attribution, the play focuses on people: how they react and move forward after their lives are shattered, and how kindness can grow new bonds of friendship in the scorched earth of loss.

Small Acts of Love is a music theatre mosaic, its narrative weaving back and forth between different times, places and people. It demands that the audience pay attention to cues indicating when, where and who is on stage, but pays off by showing the bonds formed between people as a tapestry woven of many threads in time and space, rather than a single narrative line through time. The musical parts are as evocative as the dialogue is poignant, although at times I felt the wordless vocals to be slightly at odds with the sombre substance of the play, possibly because they reminded me of Hamilton, which operates in an altogether different register.

Small Acts of Love is at its strongest when showing how mundane humanity copes in the face of incomprehensible disaster. A farmer brings in the body of a victim for fear that foxes might otherwise get at it. There is a search for the matching shoe in a pair. A rose is planted where a body was found. A decision emerges to clean and iron the effects of the victims before they are returned to their families, simply because it is the right thing to do, and once that rightness has been expressed, it is impossible to do otherwise. Small Acts of Love is a play of people searching for a path forward from tragedy, who find it because they are guided by compassion and kindness.

Arguably, it is the Lockerbie community that faces the greater challenge, despite the lesser loss of life. It is the Lockerbie residents who have to choose not to merely be victims, but to give comfort to bereaved strangers across the Atlantic, all while surrounded by the constant reminders of the disaster that befell their town. But kindness is a way through grief, even though for some, such as pastor Patrick Keegan, this journey is more difficult than for others. Small Acts of Love succeeds in conveying the different nature of the pain in both communities, without implying a difference in significance. The sorrow of the bereaved families is surreal and abstract: a plane fails to arrive at the allotted time, family and friends suddenly deleted from existence. The trauma of Lockerbie’s residents is real and visceral: debris, victims and destruction overwhelm their daily reality, leading not only to loss, but also PTSD and survivor’s guilt.

If there is a critique to be made, it is that in its desire to show how something good could emerge from catastrophe, Small Acts of Love elides the more complicated and sorrowful consequences and risks sliding into saccharine sentimentality. In reality, not everyone in the town was included in the collective response. Some were discouraged by the authorities, others too peripheral to the community to be invited in. Not all those who were wounded were healed. As the years passed, not all survivors survived. If the message of Small Acts of Love is one of communities coming together through compassion, it achieves this by omitting those who, for whatever reason, were not or could not be part of those communities.

In the end however, this selectivity is justified. We are the stories we tell about ourselves, so what is the purpose of national theatre if not to help us decide what we want those stories to be? I cannot think of a better play to mark the reopening of the Citizens than one that chooses to find hope, compassion and kindness in what can so easily be portrayed as merely catastrophe or controversy. Spinning a sensational story out of disaster is easy. Standing on a stage to tell a story of hope about a tragedy that is within living memory of your audience is hard. What Small Acts of Love tells us is that we have a choice in how we let the past shape who we are. At a time when hate and division are ascendant and compassion and kindness are on the retreat, the choice to centre the small acts of love that connect us as humans is couragous and right. As the chorus sings at the end of Act One: Let us remember.

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