Belfast, Dublin, London, Cambridge: Alan Dignam's Human Rights! Bloody Human Rights! on tour diary: Epilogue

Planning a project like this takes years. Researching and identifying the key recurring issues in business human rights abuse, turning that research into workable plays, learning how to write interactivity into the plays, raising funding, convincing people to let us perform it for them, working with the actors and project partners, performing it, producing a theatrical tour, listening, noting, collating the legislation and data, engaging with the audience and working to put together the post-production aspect of the film and interviews. Then finally developing a website for the project.

All of this was planned for, indeed so planned for that I forgot about the audience and their reactions to what we had done. Each night of performance was remarkable for the emotions and reactions it engendered in the audience - mostly inspiring but sometimes depressing. This is of course the one aspect of the project we can’t bottle and take away - the emotions in the room, the minds changed or re-engaged, the issues understood and maybe lives altered. You get a taste of it from the video but not really how intense it was at times. This in the end was the part of the project that impacted most on me. In planning and executing the project I had of course provided a forum for opening up business human rights abuse issues to the interested public. However, I had not expected the response to be so powerful and clear. These issues can be fixed and here are some good legislative aims as starting points.