A 'hallucinatory' study of the life and death of Raoul Moat

The British writer-director Robert Icke has just won a deserved Olivier for his stunning adaptation of "Oedipus", said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. His new play, about the murderer Raoul Moat, is not in that class. But even so, it's a "gripping and visceral" drama that demands to be seen.

Moat was the Newcastle bouncer who, in July 2010, sparked the biggest manhunt in UK history: newly released from prison, he shot his former partner, killed her new boyfriend, and shot and blinded a police officer. Finally tracked down after a week-long hunt, the killer took his own life. Icke's staging takes the form of an imagined trial, in which Moat (from beyond the grave) both re-enacts and reflects on these terrible events. And it "persuasively positions this hate figure as an overlooked harbinger of where we are now, when a troubling swathe of the male population seems lost, alienated and angry".

Much of the script is based on the fugitive's own testimony, written down while he was on the run, said Clive Davis in The Times. A "hallucinatory" drama that essentially unspools inside the feverish mind of a killer, it is at times disorienting. For the first hour, Icke creates an almost "unbearably intense portrait" of a violent drifter, a man "for ever on the brink of losing control"; some moments are genuinely frightening. However, towards the end the play loses momentum. "Icke has so many good ideas – yet he needs a better editor, too."

There's no doubting the power of Samuel Edward-Cook's chilling and mesmerising performance as Moat, said Georgina Brown in the Daily Mail. "Pumped-up, pulsating with anger, he is hugely intimidating. All the more so for his paranoia and self-pity" – eyeballing us as he "drips with sweat and tears". But the drama overall is "strangely plodding", said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. Uncharacteristically, Icke's work feels "unsure of – or opaque in – its intentions. Is this an anatomy of a breakdown? An investigation into the ways Moat was failed? Or a portrait of white, Northern, working-class masculinity in extreme crisis?" Currently, alas, it feels "like a bit of all, but not enough of one".

by Fara Dabhoiwala

This "meticulous and much-needed" history of free speech "arrives at an interesting moment", said Joe Moran in The Guardian. In the US, Donald Trump has made "restoring freedom of speech" a cornerstone of his presidency – while branding his critics "enemies of the people", and demanding that words such as "equality" and "gender" be removed from government communications. But as Fara Dabhoiwala points out, such contortions are nothing new: free speech has always been a "complex and compromised ideal" – and one that has often served the interests of the "moneyed and the powerful".

A British historian based at Princeton, the author explores how the concept of free speech emerged from the "long struggles for religious toleration, which blurred into free-expression battles as print spread in the 17th and 18th centuries", said Edmund Fawcett in the Financial Times. He elucidates key texts – "Cato's Letters" of the 1720s, John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" (1859) – and usefully "corrects misconceptions", such as the idea that absolute free speech is a "foundational part" of American culture. While his arguments aren't always easy to follow, this is for the most part a "rich and wide-ranging history".

It certainly makes "many good and valuable points", said David Aaronovitch in The Observer. But Dabhoiwala's alarm about the way free speech can be exploited by extremists undermines his book. He says its early proponents were "mostly a bad lot"; and that ever since, the concept has been "weaponised" by the powerful for use "against the weak". Try telling that to the millions who live in genuinely repressive societies – or to Salman Rushdie, mentioned here only as a "free-speech absolutist". While there are "interesting things" in this book, it is worrying to think of the ways it could be used by "authoritarians of all stripes".

Korean 'comfort woman' who fought for justice

Gil Won-ok, who died in February aged 96, was one of the tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of women from Korea, China and elsewhere who were seized to provide sex to Japanese troops during the Second World War. She was 13 and living in poverty in Pyongyang – which was then colonised by the Japanese – when she and other girls were lured onto a train to Manchuria, with the promise of a job in a factory, said The Times. Instead, they were forced on arrival into a military brothel (or "comfort station"). These had been set up in an effort to reduce the rapes of local women and limit the spread of venereal disease; but the system institutionalised sexual violence. In harrowing testimony, she recalled being slapped and kicked and pushed to a group of soldiers. "How could a 13-year-old girl stay calm and quiet when she got raped? I screamed, cried and physically resisted… Then I got more yelling and beatings. Eventually, all of them raped me." The soldiers then reported her for being "not obedient", and she was beaten again by the station manager.

After a year of this, she contracted syphilis, which led to tumours accumulating in her body. In hospital, she was given a hysterectomy, but the doctors failed to cure the STD, and so she was sent home. There, she did recover; but the family were still desperately poor, so she decided to try her luck in China again. "I was a fool," she recalled. In Beijing, she was soon forced into another brothel, and the rapes resumed. Finally, in 1945, the soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army disappeared, and she managed to get on a boat bound for Korea. Gil arrived in the south penniless and looking, she said, like a beggar. By the time she had made enough money to travel to the north, the country had been divided. Stuck on the wrong side of the 38th parallel, she would never see her family again.

Settling in Seoul, she scraped a living as best she could – working as a hostess and singer in bars, and running a food stand. She had had little education, and as a former "comfort woman" she was marginalised, said The Washington Post. In 1958, she adopted a son. "I would just spin in circles around my room and say, 'Thank you, God, for giving a son to a wretch like me.'" He would later become a pastor. Gil never spoke of her wartime experience, harbouring it as a shameful secret. But following the end of military rule in South Korea in the early 1990s, she was watching TV when a documentary came on about the comfort stations. Other women had started to speak out. She decided to break her silence too – and would soon emerge as one of the most vocal campaigners for reparations from Japan, an acknowledgement of what had happened, and an official apology.

Known as Grandma Gil, she toured the world testifying about her experience, and that of others like her. She took part in the Wednesday Demonstrations – weekly protests outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul that began in 1992 and which, 20 years later, were named by Guinness World Records as the world's longest-running rally on a single theme. She also co-founded the Butterfly Fund, which raises money for the victims of sexual slavery in wars around the world. But her demands, for compensation and a full official apology, were not met, said The New York Times. Tokyo has acknowledged the suffering of the comfort women but refuses to accept that they were coerced into sexual slavery; and it says that claims arising from its colonial rule were settled under a treaty agreed in 1965. Gil was one of only seven known surviving comfort women. "They are wrong if they think it will be over when the last of us die," she said in 2013. "There will be our descendants continuing to campaign as long as it takes to get the apology we deserve. It will not be over with our death."