BLACK HANDS / DEAD SECTION

$5.40 – $15.00

In 1967, as the Vietnam war escalated and the world's streets exploded in protest, a group of young, white, West German university students took up arms against a democratically-elected government in which their belief had died.

They bought guns, robbed banks, trained with Palestinian militants, engaged in gun battles with police, kidnapped prominent citizens and bombed US army bases in an urban guerrilla campaign that lasted 10 years. They believed they were revolutionaries; the government condemned them as terrorists. History remembers them as the Baader-Meinhof Gang.

This epic, award-winning play is the story of their idealistic beginnings and their violent end.

(Commissioned by the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.)

"Outstanding writing, with an epic range, a complexity of vision, and a balance of mood and emotion, all of which is brought into service to directly confront a fiercely difficult subject - terrorism. At last, a voice pushing our theatre out of the drawing room smallness of recent plays and tackling the great themes. Brecht without the didacticism." - Judges Veronica Kelly and Andrew Ross, Queensland Premier's Literary Awards, 2005

APT