Factor 9

115270 original

Rab and Bruce committed no crime; they are just two ordinary Edinburgh men bound together by one common factor. They are both haemophiliacs. And for this, they and hundreds of others were handed a death sentence by the institution they trusted most. The National Health Service.

Factor 9 is a piece of political theatre at its most stark and powerful, tracing a through line from the Nazi medical experiments on prisoners of war in the 1940s, via the Nuremberg Code to a prison in Arkansas in which inmates became the raw material in a production line of blood treatments that eventually went on to infect tens of thousands of haemophiliacs worldwide with hepatitis C, HIV and AIDS. In Scotland, NHS patients were told that the blood products on offer were manufactured domestically, the donations rigorously tested. The treatments were safe. And yet...

Telling the story of two men who have campaigned for justice for nearly two decades, this dramatised polemic is grippingly powerful. It's a play full of righteous indignation, and it sometimes gets carried away on the crest of its own fury. But there is a lot to be angry about here. This is a story as much about cover-up and conspiracy as it is about the horror and heartache of futures lost and lives cut short.

Stewart Porter and Matthew Zajac both give compelling performances. The multimedia staging is both surgically sterile and filthily desolate, capturing the smallness and fragility of lives lived in the shadow of commercial and state interests that care little for them. The play screams out on their behalf.