Game show

It is November 1992 and in the suburbs of a Bosnian town, a small family cowers in the basement of their shattered home. Over the next forty-eight hours, Gustav, a Bosnian-Muslim boy aged only ten will be routed from his home, watch his neighbours herded like animals through the streets, witness a brutal attack on his sister, and be caught up in a bloody massacre. The only way he can rationalise events is as ? ?a game without rules, without a board or playing pieces?.The adults didnt know what to do. No-one was in control. ?.What if you didnt want to join in? How would you know when the game was over??Meanwhile, in a nondescript northern town in Britain, over the same forty-eight hour period, preparations are being made for the final programme in a television game show series. The cutting-edge format of Game Show promises contestants an opportunity for dangerous excitement and radical self-discovery, outrageous behaviour behind the anonymity of masks and disguises, not to mention huge prize money. Plied with alcohol, led through endless draughty corridors, refused access to water or toilets, they lose track of the distinctions between true and false, real and created, right and wrong. Strangers to one another, in the closed environment of a studio where action and consequence are declared to bear no relation to each other or to any other norm or form of society, they too must learn to play the game which has no rules, no structure and in which no-one, it seems, is in control.?Game Show? explores issues of personal identity, choices and individual accountability against a backdrop of a war that becomes a game, and a game that becomes a war. Although the Bosnian war took place twenty years ago the issues it raised are still disturbingly current as UN Special Ambassador Angelina Jolie seeks to publicise the use and consequences of rape as a weapon of war, as civil war in Syria continues to rage and as our society becomes increasingly aware of the damage which ensues when systems allow people to act with impunity.