Writer and Director: Laila Latifa
With a mysterious death, a femme fatale who insists she is innocent and two female detectives certain that she isn’t, Laila Latifa’s play Conscience pitches itself as a 1960s-set police thriller based around a series of interviews with the prime suspect. Following in the footsteps of Line of Duty and Criminal: UK, Latifa’s 50-minute piece has moments of tension and an intriguing but ambiguous lead, although it needs a little more time to establish its broader premise and bring the two scenarios together.
It is December 1969 and Bella is brought in for questioning by two police detectives about the suspicious death of her unnamed flatmate, found at their home. With all the evidence pointing to only one potential murderer, the police are certain they can get a confession, yet Bella is wilier than they imagine and refuses to play their game.
Latifa’s story is full of intrigue that tries to hold back information from the audience for as long as possible. Built around two longer interview scenes across successive days, the relationships that the writer imagines between the suspect and one of the detectives as well as the flatmates are starting to develop quite nicely, leaving the viewer with plenty of questions about who Bella is, what danger she poses and why one of the detectives is so susceptible to her personal overtures.
But there is another dimension to this play that isn’t yet fulfilling its potential, hinted at only by a fourth character visible to all the rest who potters between scenes, cleaning and rearranging the room. The eventual resolution – which includes a clever repositioning of the story – brings the two segments together but Conscience could seed its alternative reality a little earlier, at least inserting a breadcrumb trail for the audience that eventually makes sense in the finale.
As a result, Latifa’s play is full of unresolved threads including why it is set in the 1960s at all – apart from the opportunity for costume and music choices – why the two female detectives are wearing contemporary suits and why Bella is so obstructive. It is hard to know whether the semi-period setting is a deliberate red herring or it is actually 1969, and if the latter, then the likelihood of any female detectives and some of the language choices don’t quite fit with the era. If the play is using a pseudo version of the 1960s for some other purpose, then that also needs to be clearer about why Bella aligns herself with this era.
The lighting cues are a bit haphazard with some blunt mid-scene shifts that don’t quite hit the right tone and occasionally the actors have trouble staying in the light, but the simple staging ensures the focus remains largely on Bella. Performed by Amelia Kingsnorth, Olivia Rainbow, Zafra Howard and Jacqueline Crain, there is certainly plenty to chew over in this Camden Fringe production staged at the Cockpit Theatre, and there is lots of creativity in Latifa’s imaginative writing, it just needs to be a little longer to blend all those ideas together.
Runs until 5 August 2023
Camden Fringe runs until 27 August 2023
