The Shell Seven, by Margaret Heffernan, for BBC Radio 4

Author: Margaret Heffernan. Review by Rebecca Hardy

Just over twelve months ago, a group of Extinction Rebellion (XR) protestors made headlines when they were acquitted for criminal damages to Shell’s headquarters, despite having no defence in law, and being indisputably guilty of the charges.

Legal experts at the time hailed the decision as ‘a breakthrough’. It was perhaps unsurprising then that the case would attract the attention of writers quick to spot the dramatic potential in a two-week trial in which XR protestors got what they wanted: to be put in front of a random audience of UK citizens, and to tell the truth about the climate crisis.

The case began in April 2019, when, as part of XR’s ‘spring rebellion’, a group of ‘Rebels’ smashed the front doors of the Shell building on London’s South Bank, sprayed it with graffiti and hung a banner accusing the oil company of ecocide. Two days later the seven activists were arrested and charged with criminal damage. Two years later, they faced a jury in Southwark Crown Court.

The trial drew the attention of writer Margaret Hefferman who, before devising the radio play The Shell Seven, claimed in the Financial Times that the verdict ‘raises big questions about how far the law can protect companies that do not take real action to deal with the climate emergency’. Arguing that the ‘the Shell court case has revealed a greater public demand for climate action than many might have thought’, the writer quickly set to devising a play.

Such words might seem hopeful now, given the recent crackdown on protest in the controversial Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, coupled with the lack of meaningful action on the climate crisis, but the piece is a timely, affecting reminder of a real life drama where, for two weeks in a courtroom, something quietly incredible happened.

The play opens with the blare of police megaphones and television bulletins, delivering the news of what, on first sight, could seem like an act of mere vandalism. By the end of the drama, however, the mood is very different. From the beginning, we hear XR co-founder Simon Bramwell, one of the Shell Seven, set out the group’s intention to cause over £6,000 worth of damage to make sure they get the case in front of a jury – ‘to enrol them in the litany of catastrophes that are headed their way’.

‘It’s clear that we did the crime,’ another of the protestors says. ‘We were obviously guilty,’ setting out the trial’s dramatic turn: that, despite seeming an open and shut case, the group somehow managed to be acquitted. These obstacles appear even more insurmountable when the judge ruled that there could be no defence in law for their actions. ‘We put forward various legal arguments, including the right to free speech and that the defendants were acting out of necessity and to stop criminal offences occurring elsewhere,’ says defence lawyer Raj Chada. ‘The judge said that none of those defences would be available and so the lawyers had no defence to use.’

This no-defence ruling meant that the defendants had to self-represent, which, it turned out, seemed to work in their favour. This ‘liberated them’, in a way, says Quaker XR co-founder Ian Bray in the play, another Shell protestor, allowing them to speak directly to the jurors with impassioned testimonies. ‘It kind of disarmed them,’ he later told me, although it was also an invasive process.

The play is a moving, absorbing courtroom drama blending real-life recorded interviews with actors’ reenactments. Margaret Hefferman brings the courtroom to life, revealing the powerful effect that the protestors’ heartfelt words must have had on the assembled jury, which, by the end, left many in tears.

Through their words, the court’s sober atmosphere is vividly recreated: with all its nervousness, tension and pomp. ‘Nothing happens quickly,’ Ian Bray says, ‘but still there’s this invisible pressure: the dark matter in the corner.’

Another protester, Jane Augsburger, describes going to the toilet and witnessing people breaking down, hitting her with the seriousness of where they had landed: and the sense that lives could be destroyed. Hefferman deftly brings to life what Simon Bramwell calls the trial’s ‘magic and sorrow’, weaving authentic interviews with actorly representations. Because the defendants are self-representing they sit on the bench nearer to the jury, not in the dock. This helped them get closer, says Jane Augsburger.

Responding to their painstaking questioning, the humanity of the protestors’ words shines through. ‘I didn’t want to cut my hair,’ Senan Clifford tells us, ‘because I wanted to do me’. At times coming across as a gently-spoken geography teacher, Senan Clifford’s testimony is a far cry from the yah-boo grandstanding that some might expect. ‘My life is about repairing things… It upsets me, things getting broken.’

‘I wanted to teach the jury about climate change and Shell,’ he goes on, describing how he showed the jurors the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph which depicts a flatline of temperature staying steady throughout civilisation, then rocketing up in the last hundred years. ‘I disagree with [the prosecutors’] words that I was reckless and causing damage without care. We were really careful and felt that Shell was reckless.’

Ending with the observation that two weeks after the rebellion, the government declared a climate emergency, Senan Clifford asks the jury, given what he knew about Shell’s ecocide: ‘What else could I have done?’

Senan Clifford’s testimony is just one of many moving speeches that build in intensity, as we begin to get a sense of how the mood in the courtroom is starting to shift. The humanity of the defendants contrasts with the officialdom of the prosecution, who sometimes seem to flounder faced with the protestors’ heartfelt defence and their desire to avert the planet from disaster.

As Margaret Hefferman wrote in the Evening Standard, each testimony was different. ‘Senan Clifford, sixty, recounted his frustration and despair about the environment. David Lambert, sixty-two, described how mainstream voices urging action… reinforced his desire to prevent suffering. Ian Bray, fifty-three, a Quaker, felt a duty to speak truth to power. Simon Bramwell, forty-nine, believed it was wrong that companies had rights while nature did not. Jane Augsburger, fifty-five, addressed what she saw as criminal damage to the planet. And James Saunders, forty-one, described how, sitting on the canopy of the building’s entrance, he’d believed Shell employees would want him to save them from the suffering climate change would cause.’ Missing is the seventh defendant, Katerina Hasapopoulous, who had previously pleaded guilty, concerned about the impact a trial would have on her child.

The story is a perfect vehicle for verbatim theatre as the real testimonies are so moving and quietly devastating that they can easily speak for themselves. James Saunders from Stroud talks of singing as a youth in Salisbury Cathedral and praying for prisoners of conscience. ‘That is where I learnt about where to follow your heart in life. There is nowhere I would rather be in this world right now than in this courtroom.’

Jane Augsburger says that her action was ‘actually the most honest thing I’ve ever done’ and describes how, when the authorities finally arrived, a policeman looked her in the eye and said ‘We’re ruining this planet’. She talks of how the protestors developed a relationship with the jury, speaking to them ‘just as if they were on a bus with them…There was a sense that we all went through an experience together’.

The play builds in atmosphere to the closing statements where some of the protestors apologise to the jury for having to hear about the scale of the crisis, many for the first time. Again, the statements are simple but powerful. ‘We hope you will agree. We acted carefully and consciously with love and with grief.’ ‘It’s not about broken windows,’ another says. ‘It about how we face our future, or fail to do so. People, do not be complicit in that – the largest crime of all.’

Meanwhile, the defence is summed up with Raj Chada’s preemptive words: ‘In law this is the simplest of cases but I hope you’ll agree, that it’s not simple at all. Yes, they did the damage, but yes, Shell is the real criminal.’

Writing on the XR website last year, after witnessing the trial herself, freelance journalist Jessica Townsend describes the moment when ‘the small awkward courtroom seemed to crack open to allow us suddenly to see planetary-size problems – rather than small scale crimes. After the speeches there was a real sense that all the people in the court had been on a profound journey together – including our opponents. A sense of intimacy flowered.’

The jury of seven women and five men took seven hours and four minutes to acquit them of both charges. As the verdicts come in, the mood is sombre and reflective. Music plays quietly, as Simon Bramwell describes watching the foreman of the jury ‘choke up and talk through the tears to give a verdict of “not guilty”, and to see tears in the eyes of the other jurors’. Senan Clifford tells us of the moment the police handed him back his oil and spray cans. ‘Does that mean we are free to go back to the Shell building now?’ he quips, to which the policeman says: ‘Yes. But please don’t.’

The Shell Seven audio drama is a timely and intricate piece that captures the understated drama of the case, where for a moment it seems as if the rules of court engagement were gently overturned. In a time when protest is being more criminalised, and scientists’ warnings on the unfolding catastrophe are evermore dire, it stands as a powerful piece of witness. However, I would have liked to hear more of the spiritual underpinnings which inspired the protestors. Though the play conveys their commitment to love and justice, we hear little of their spiritual groundedness (indeed, the word ‘spiritual’ is mentioned only once, by Quaker Ian Bray). For me, having interviewed two of the XR protestors – co-founders Ian Bray and Simon Bramwell – the thing that most struck me was their peaceful surrender to the process. The spiritual influences of XR are relatively well known in Quaker circles, but not much beyond. It would have been nice to have some light shone on these roots.

‘We had decided to try to treat the whole trial process as active worship – upholding everyone in the room,’ Ian Bray told me last summer, when we met up to talk about the trial. ‘That was amazingly intense and hard to do: trying to sit in the room like I did in Meeting for Worship and holding that space. Later, I kind of found out that what I was doing was what Martin Luther King called “fidelity to the law”, where we are fully accountable for our actions. A lot of people in counsel for trial want to be confrontational in court, but King’s idea was that you submit to the thought process. You submit to being shut down by the judges and having your right to speech curtailed. It’s not intuitive to lots of people. They think I’m going to get into court and tell them what to think and put my case to them. I tried to turn to face whoever was speaking, and uphold them. It might have looked weird, but it was a better way to hear and lean into them. I was trying to see the God in everything. I didn’t see the judge as an adversary.’

Simon Bramwell said it felt that they were ‘trying to anchor a very specific intention within the trial. Again, there was this idea of being non-oppositional: my own process was of trying to find the Buddha nature in the court staff, and the judge, and the attenders, and the clerks. But it was wider than that: it was trying to unpick and constantly offer different perspectives to the rest of our codefendants’. It also required ‘a radical honesty of surrender to the process; to willingly offer our hearts for the consequences, but being grateful for the trial, and for the jurors – because it was a hard time for them, spending two weeks there. Some of them too were finding out for the first time what jeopardy our systems are in.’

According to XR, the Shell Seven trial was the first of a series of acquittals of XR protesters by juries in the crown courts. A further thirteen or so jury trials are scheduled over the coming months, including that of co-founder Gail Bradbrook for criminal damage to the Department for Transport, which has been postponed to November. Ultimately, though, perhaps the case acts as a beacon of hope: that confronted with the real facts about the crisis, truth and justice may prevail. As one of the protestors says in the last line of the play: ‘Hope is not about an expected outcome but doing the right thing. And we should never underestimate that.’

Rebecca is the journalist at the Friend. The Shell Seven can be heard at www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00162v0.

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