The Guardian
December 10, 2001
By Elisabeth Mahoney

Last night's Sunday Play (Radio 3) featured the second and third parts of Democracy and Language, a thrilling trilogy of plays by John Fletcher. The final play, Everyone for Themselves, was a powerful drama about language, power and memory. Two narratives, based on true stories, were woven together: a debating society at the Colorado maximum security prison, where Timothy McVeigh (played by Joseph Fiennes) was held, and a Russian mother's attempts to trace the body of her son, killed in military action. To find him, she must sift through a vast repository of bodily remains at a Red Army laboratory, looking for a birthmark she recognises or "fingernails with familiar stains". After searching 14 refrigerated storerooms ("a frozen charnel house") and travelling to Siberia to meet another mother - their sons' bodies got mixed up and wrongly identified - she is left with half of what may be her son's foot and a flap of skin. It is, somehow, enough.