In its starkest form, this is the question that Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz debates in the most provocative chapter of his book Why Terrorism Works.

Considering the issue in terms of ends-versus-means utilitarian ethics, he argues that torture carried out under legal warrant, subject to safeguards and accountability, might be preferable to a "don't ask, don't tell" policy of unsanctioned basement brutality.

Dershowitz writes:


But who would actually carry out the torture, and under what conditions? How would the safeguards and judicial constraints be enforced? What might the process actually be like?

The play sets out to explore the situation in which investigators, desperate to get information about a so-called "ticking bomb", resort for the first time to a "rigorous interrogation", under the rules and conditions laid down in what is known as the Dershowitz Protocol.


Robert Fothergill, Playwright

Born in England in 1941, and educated at Downing College, Cambridge, Robert Fothergill came to Canada in 1963 to pursue graduate work at McMaster and the University of Toronto. His PhD dissertation was published as Private Chronicles: a Study of English Diaries by Oxford University Press in 1974. After teaching for many years in the English Department of Atkinson College at York University, he transferred to the Department of Theatre in the Faculty of Fine Arts in 1994, serving as Chair for five years. Reluctantly retired in 2006, he continues to teach as if nothing had happened.

An early play, Something To Do, won a prize in a one-act play competition at the U of T in 1965, but for a number of years he was more involved in film, founding the Canadian Film-Makers Distribution Centre in 1967, with Lorne Michaels and David Cronenberg, and making the controversial TV news simulation, "Countdown Canada," in 1970.

His plays include Detaining Mr. Trotsky (Canadian Stage Company, 1987, Chalmers Award and Dora nominations), Public Lies (Tarragon Theatre, 1993, Chalmers and Dora nominations), The Dershowitz Protocol (Toronto Summerworks Festival, 2003, remounted at Cabaret Downstairs Theatre, Rochester, NY, summer 2006), and Borderline (Summerworks 2004 and CBC-Radio 2005). These four plays are published as Public Lies and Other Plays by Playwrights Canada Press, 2007. A new play, Disciples, premiered in the 2007 Summerworks festival.

Other involvement in theatre has included old geezer roles in Theatre@York productions, as well as three recent visits to India to direct Canadian plays with students at the Universities of Baroda and Jaipur.