He followed this us with another piece of verbatim theatre, the Arab-Israeli Cookbook. This examined the Middle East situation by talking to both Arabs and Jews while the co-directors were also Arabic and Jewish.
Soans went to talk to the people and hit on the idea of having them cook a meal while they talked. It was a way in which people talked naturally rather than delivering a polemic. He particularly recalls one woman going into her garden to collect a lemon and returning to tell him that she could never forget the bullet holes in the gate. "It was the human side of politics."
Talking to Terrorists, his new verbatim play, seemed a natural follow-up. And, yes, he did go to talk to terrorists.
Surprisingly, he never used a tape-recorder. "A notebook and pencil is less threatening," he says..
He talked to terrorists from several campaigns but also included those affected by it including politicians, ambassadors and victims.
"When you do an interview there is always three phases to it. First there is the conversation as you meet, then you sit down to talk about the subject and finally the farewell conversation.
"Nine tenths of what I use is that bit at the beginning and end," he says. The lecture in the middle is what Newsnight or The Guardian might use but that's the difference between newspapers, television and the theatre. We are more interested in humanity."
There were some he spoke to who did not wish to discuss certain aspects of their lives, the man who organised the blowing up the the Brighton hotel, for example, declining to discuss "operational aspects".
Soans says he had to respect that. "If they are willing to talk to me it is their right to say what the agenda will be. For some, memories of their youth are too painful to unearth." One woman who was supervising torture at the age of 13 did not want to go back to that. "There is a girl who left home to join the army at the age of six. Why? I think that is a question worth asking."
But he did draw the line between those he felt were fighting for a cause and those involved in mindless violence. Some of the terrorism in Iraq, he says, is of the mindless variety when a bomb kills three Americans and 50 Iraqis.
