Palace of the End, Arcola Theatre, London

(ROBERT WORKMAN)

This London premiere of Judith Thompson's award-winning triptych of monologues about Iraq could not be better timed, coming in the wake of Wikileaks revelations about the appalling scale of prisoner abuse and civilian fatalities and the publication of the post-mortem report on the death of Dr David Kelly. Played with a blazing intensity by Robin Soans, the weapons inspector entreats the audience to bear witness to his suicide and to his justification for it in the central monologue. On either side, we hear from a character who is clearly based on Lynndie England, the grinning female soldier who gave a thumbs-up sign in the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs and from the widow of the head of the Iraqi Communist party whose family suffered obscene torture in the early days of Saddam's regime.

Thompson's trio of solo-plays certainly hit you smack in the gut in this beautifully performed and eloquent production by Jessica Swales. I have, however, to register a certain moral unease at the plays' sometimes unduly manipulative mix of fact and speculation.

What were Kelly's final thoughts as he lay dying on Harrowdown Hill? We'll never know and while I am not saying that it is inherently presumptuous of a dramatist to put words into his mouth, I do feel that here, paradoxically because her agenda is so worthy, Thompson is guilty of insensitive supposition. "The only way to defeat them is to disappear," her version of Kelly declares of the authorities who are persecuting him for leaking information about the dodgy dossier. Though she tactfully handles his self-berating torment and his concern for his family, Thompson wants Kelly's suicide to represent the symbolic victory of truth-telling over career-minded caution, so she even has him wonder if suicide is the right term: "Do you say that a soldier who loses his life in the name of freedom, truth and compassion has killed himself?"

It's all far too simplified, sanitised and exemplary. I have related problems with the final monologue, too. The restraint with which Imogen Smith as the widow recounts the horrors visited on her family for not betraying their communist comrades are almost unbearably moving. But her suffering and stoicism effectively place the character beyond criticism, allowing highly debatable views, such as the suggestion of a moral equivalence between Saddam and Blair/Bush, to pass unquestioned.

The most successful monologue is the one which takes us into the deeply troubling mentality of the Lynndie England clone, now heavily pregnant and awaiting trial. Excellent Jade Williams painfully captures the trashy trailer-park vacancy and the combination of flip, I'm-a-celebrity defensiveness and underlying fear, as she compulsively Googles herself, despite the pornographically insulting nature of both the plaudits and the taunts. Without exonerating her actions, this play offers a horrifying picture of the educational limitations and the mindless teenage violence in small-town America and shows how a plain, bullied girl leapt at the chance to become one of the bullying boys. Your view of her is left queasily complicated.

To 20 November (020 7503 1646)