London theatregoers will decide the guilt or innocence of air force pilot who shoots down passenger jet hijacked by terrorists

A play that asks the audience to decide the guilt or innocence of a morally compromised pilot who shoots down a hijacked passenger plane is coming to the UK after international success.

Ferdinand von Schirach’s play Terror has become something of global phenomenon since it opened in Berlin in 2015.

It follows the courtroom drama of an air force pilot, Major Lars Koch, who had been ordered to divert an aeroplane with 164 people on board that had been hijacked by terrorists. When the plane suddenly changes course towards a football stadium with 70,000 people watching the Germany-England game, what should Koch do?

The play has been staged in seven countries as well as on television in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

It is now coming to the UK this summer courtesy of the Lyric Hammersmith theatre in west London.

The Lyric’s artistic director, Sean Holmes, said it was less a play about terror and more one that explored clashes of personal and state morality.

“What I like about the play is its seriousness and its populism. I know that’s a dirty word these days, but I mean it in the most positive sense,” he said. “It is a proper interrogation of the effect that terror has on our lives, in our attitude to the rule of law. But it is really about our personal moral judgment as opposed to what the state might say.

“All of that seems apt at the moment given where we are politically and people losing faith in political institutions.”

On the face of it, a verdict of not guilty might seem obvious: up to 70,000 deaths in the stadium as opposed to 164 on the plane. But Holmes said there were clever moral and philosophical twists and turns in the play that made it less black and white.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sean Holmes, who will direct Terror: ‘It is a proper interrogation of the effect that terror has on our lives.’ Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

A website for the play charts the number of guilty and not guilty verdicts across the 46 theatres in seven countries that have staged the show. In 1,063 trials, 91.9% of verdicts have been not guilty.

Of the 287,236 jurors who have cast a vote 60.7% voted not guilty. In Japan, two-thirds of jurors found the pilot guilty.

Holmes, who will direct Terror, said he had organised a rehearsed reading of the play last year and the 50 audience members all “really took notice of what was being said” and took their responsibilities seriously.

The play, which will have a British cast, is part of a newly announced 2017 season that also features a new adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull by Simon Stephens, which will star Lesley Sharp.

Terror, Lyric Hammersmith, 14 June to 15 July