'We are all potential terrorists,' says Robin Soans, whose play puts global terrorism into a familiar local context, writes Susan McKay

He's an English writer bringing a play about terrorism to this country, and Robin Soans is well aware of the perils. "Ah yes, Ireland," he says. "Where angels fear to tread." Certainly, there will be many in the Irish audience who will be "more informed than I am", he says, "but maybe not of the global context". He actually wrote Talking to Terrorists, which opens tonight in a new Calypso production at the Samuel Beckett Theatre in Dublin, as an urgent address to his own compatriots. "In England terrorism is regarded as an outside force, even though the London bombers of July 2005 turned out to be English," he says.

"Newspapers in England have become gossip sheets - the media is fixated on reality TV and gossip. The only thing that can knock scandal off the front pages is fear, and it suits the government to keep people fearful and unquestioning. So, since debate isn't being conducted in a serious way on TV and in the newspapers, theatre is taking that on, just as it did during the Restoration."

Soans describes the sacking of British MP Jenny Tonge in 2004 by the then Liberal Democrat leader, Charles Kennedy, as "the most disappointing event in recent British political history". Tonge had said that if she had lived in Palestine, she might have become a suicide bomber. Kennedy said it was a "totally unacceptable" statement.

Tonge was right, Soans contends. "We are all potential terrorists. The thwarting of aspirations in a domestic setting spawns violence," he says. "Many of us in the same situation would react in the same way." He talks about people who are "bright but blocked". The man who carried out the Dunblane school massacre had put in 148 applications to the local council for various schemes, he says. "In the end he just explodes."

In the play, it is a British army colonel, recalling his time in Northern Ireland, who says that he realised in a moment of epiphany that if he had been born in South Armagh he would have been a terrorist. He adds: "That's an understanding every soldier should have. None of this is personal." A former leader of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade (AMB) from Bethlehem demands of the audience: "How can you judge me unless you have lived the life I have lived?" The play, which originally opened in London just a few nights before the devastating 2005 al-Qaeda bombs, is another piece of verbatim theatre from Soans. That is to say it is constructed from the actual words of real people who have been interviewed about their experiences, rather than imagined by the author.

His previous work in this genre includes The Arab-Israeli Cookbook. "I spent three weeks in Israel and on the West Bank and I asked everyone I met to cook me a meal," Soans says. "I didn't want agit-prop, I wanted personal views. I don't set out with an agenda - I construct a play out of what I find." Talking to Terrorists consists of skilfully interwoven extracts from interviews that Soans conducted with former members of the IRA and the UVF, the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), the Ugandan National Resistance Army (NRA) and the AMB.

The voices of others are also there, including a relief worker, an archbishop's envoy, an ex-British ambassador, a journalist, a former secretary of state to Northern Ireland, and a group of young Muslims from Luton. Edward, a psychiatrist, is a sort of guide. At one point he tells us that "the key to the ideology of violence is to see your enemy as sub-human. They are only Jews, gays, blacks, not normal in any sense of the word."

Some of the characters are easy to identify. Mo Mowlam extols the advantages of having a state car: "John and I can both go out and get pissed." She says the way to beat terrorists is to talk to them, and wishes "Tony" could appreciate this.

There is Patrick Magee, the Brighton bomber, whose chilling defence of his actions is challengingly undercut by a brief scene showing the everyday life of Margaret Tebbitt since the bomb - the wife of the former Tory government minister was seriously injured in the blast and is now confined to a wheelchair.

The envoy is Terry Waite, who raises a laugh with his story about asking his captors for books and getting a manual for breast feeding: "It wasn't even illustrated." The former British ambassador is Craig Murray, who discovered in Uzbekistan that his government was quite content to use American intelligence extracted by torture. It didn't matter that the information so obtained was unreliable, as long as it confirmed that "the Islamic menace is out there". It didn't even matter that a man was boiled alive.

The play shows that some of those who engaged in horrific violence were themselves the victims of such violence as very young children, and some were inducted into armies as child soldiers. The youngest at drill in the Ugandan NRA was six years old, and children that were smaller than their AK47s practised with sticks instead. They might be made to kill their parents to show their loyalty. "As a child I saw what a grown up would expect to see only a glimpse of once in a lifetime," says a Ugandan woman soldier. "An old person grew in me like wildfire. I'm 28 years old now; sometimes I feel 15, sometimes I'm 200." The Palestinian former head of the AMB went to jail for six years when he was 14. "We assume an age of responsibility," he says. "But how can you be responsible if that is all you've known all your life?"

Soans is a "very political" longtime leftie and very critical of the status quo in Britain today. Remarkably, Talking to Terrorists comes highly acclaimed by British critics right across the political spectrum: the Independent on Sunday called it "superb investigative docudrama"; the Guardian praised it for strenuously avoiding romanticising terrorism; the Daily Telegraph called it "important, illuminating and moving"; and the Sunday Express called it "startling and challenging". Soans says proudly that the entire Scotland Yard anti-terrorist squad came to see it. "They said they found it very informative," he says. "A senior Muslim cleric said he was amazed it was such a wise play."

There is much with which to quarrel. Terrorists are certainly made, not born, but taking up arms is not always the inevitable response to oppression, humiliation and deprivation.

In this country, some of the most compelling critics of those who joined paramilitary groups are precisely those who grew up and lived in the same circumstances. They made other choices, suffered because of the activities of the paramilitaries, and feel they have every right to judge.

SOME OF THE self-justifying claims made by those who engaged in violence are highly dubious, but there is no dialogue with other characters who might dispute this version of reality and so they go unchallenged. Motivations such as sectarianism are not admitted. Investigative journalism provides context and checks facts - this sort of drama, presumably, does not.

Soans willingly admits the play is flawed. "One of the troubles of my play is that it tries to cover too much ground," he says, disarmingly. "Other playwrights find it amazing that I criticise my own work. I don't really have an ego." He is not, however, modest. "This play is like Chekhov," he says. "More than you can imagine." He sat in on early rehearsals of this production with Calypso director Bairbre Ni Chaoimh and her cast. "I've made some changes to the script, too," he says. "It is a while since I looked at it and there were a couple of bits where I just thought, 'that's a bit wanky'." He's an actor himself - his most recent role was as the equerry in Stephen Frears's The Queen. "I taught them how to behave - it is a very funny scene," he says.

Talking to Terrorists isn't about resolving the issues, he stresses, but about raising the questions: "I'm giving a voice to people whose voices aren't generally heard. I'm trying to explain why people do the things they do." There is a flash of anger. "I write because of moralistic judgmental tendencies to marginalise and belittle. I'm trying to stop people being smug and content, and to get them to talk about issues which, in my country, are just not talked about at all."

Talking to Terrorists opens tonight and is at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin until Mar 31