Wednesday
31st October
This visit created a great deal of mixed emotions for me: nostalgia, irritation, sadness, nerves, fascination and awe.
The play was put on in the activity hall of the local Territorial Army centre, although I was in the Navy and not the Army, all MOD installations are carbon copies of each other so from the minute we passed the Corporal guarding the gate I found myself going into ‘sailor mode’, my posture and behaviour changed and I had to stop myself from standing to attention and saluting every time a ranking Officer or NCO walked past.
We selected our seats on the stage right side of the staging area as recommended by a member of the production staff. Due to being set up in the activity hall of the base, the performance area had been set up on a level with most of the audience in a ‘Thrust stage’ format, creating a great sense of intimacy to the performance.
The start of the show created even more nostalgia seeing the first two characters on stage fully kitted up in the typical squaddie patrol gear that is so familiar to me. The script and characterization were so real that I started to become irritated with the behaviour of the characters and how they got into trouble as it reminded me so much of certain ‘characters’ in my own Navy Training Division who through similar behaviour were always getting us into trouble.
All the way through the performance I found myself utterly fascinated and in awe of the ingenuity of the production. The simple stage, lighting and sound set up were used to maximum effect, creating the perfect ambience for each scene.
Right down to pumping the smell of disinfectant into the hall at the start of the hospital scenes.
Turning over the hospital beds to create WWI trenches.
The use of projection and sounds to create the nightmares and hallucinations of the ‘Shell-shocked’/PTSD suffering patients.
Great acting/characterization and costumes turning a relatively small cast of five actors into multiple different people, to a point that it took me about ¾ of the show to realise that there were actually so few actors.
All in all the show was very good, entertaining even if it did dig up a few un-expected emotions from me, (but isn’t that the point?), interesting from a technical point of view and utterly fascinating from an artistic/engineering point of view.
