Review Bad Roads

Tim Gopsill is moved and informed by a harrowing and insightful drama on civil war in the Ukraine.

Bad Roads
by Natal'ya Vorozhbit
Translated by Sasha Dugdale

Sex And Savagery In The Ukraine
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

Ordinary people are still killing each other in the Ukraine, mysteriously unreported in Britain after three years of civil war. Where media are failing, theatre is stepping in, with accounts of the traumas of war more horrifying than anything you would see on the news.

The Royal Court has a programme of co-operation with Ukrainian playwrights, supported by the British Council, and is presenting Bad Roads by Natal'ya Vorozhbit, where the conflict is seen through the eyes of women.

Bad Roads is a psychodrama with six scenes in which a number of women confront men at war as individuals; men they encounter, or want to be with, or by whom they are held captive. Some violence is involved in two of them.

The brutalisation the men have suffered is complicated and spasmodic. Loving one minute, aggressive the next. But made even more problematic when those men are  put in murderous danger.

So the encounters are not simply between belligerent men and innocent women. There is a recognition of something more complex, even a frisson of attraction towards a dirty, hungry, desperate fighting man somewhere inside the desperate women.

Likewise the men are not all-conquering. They are victims of war as well. In some of the sex scenes, enacted or recalled, their own sexual vulnerability is displayed.

This is not to downgrade  the most horrific, degrading scene which takes place in total darkness; the sounds are harrowing enough. Ria Zmitrowicz convinces as Yulia in her combination of vulnerability and knowingness, weakness and strength; as does Tadgh Murphy as Stas, the soldier, with his internal conflicts and erratic behaviour.

The settings are all dark in any case. Camilla Clarke’s set consists entirely of stripped bare tree trunks, through which the actors rush or creep in dim light like fighters in a forest, and has just a couple of upended chairs, an iron bath and a chest freezer cabinet, whose grisly contents most of the time have to be imagined.

Director Vicky Featherstone handles this touchy, knife-edge material carefully with varied pacing.  The first and longest scene, for instance, has a woman journalist (Kate Dickie) recounting a week-long visit to the front line, which establishes at the start the ambiguities of the male and female liaisons within the play.

Interestingly all the seven-strong cast, who double up for the 14 roles, have strong regional British Isles accents, which emphasise the varied cultures within a state at civil war. They are different peoples but what they have in common, in place of a national identity, is their suffering.

Bad Roads is brilliantly written and bravely acted. It has to be said that it is challenging, not to say painful, to watch and listen to at times and thoroughly deserves an amber/green light.

Review X

X

by Alistair McDowall

Space Oddity

www.royalcourt.co.uk

Gosh, if life in Pluto were a tax dodge, more off planet than off-shore, as Alistair McDowall imagines in his dystopian fantasy X directed by Vicky Featherstone, one has to wonder who's the accountant?!

In fact there are no accountants or lawyers or Panama hats in  this play seemingly set in space. But it did raise a sardonic collective laugh early on as one of the crew of workers stranded on Pluto, way past their contracted six months with tax-free earnings commented, "There are easier  ways to avoid tax".

And what a nightmare of unpaid uncontracted overtime it is, where zero hours takes on a whole new meaning as time itself slips and disintegrates with flashbacks and doubling back like a disturbing form of neurofeedback.

At the centre of this inside-out universe designed as a gray-green vaulting cube by Merle Hensel  is Gilda (Jessica Raine), a geologist and second in command to veteran astronaut Ray (Darrell D'Silva).

The latter has a dangerous nostalgia for pre-internet twentieth century life when a tweet meant birdsong. Belligerent technician Clark (James Harkness), maths' nerd Cole (Rudi Dharmalingham)  and  Mattie (Ria Zmitrowicz) who maintains "the ladies", the oxygen and water systems, complete the team.   And could it be that the spaceship is haunted by a prepubescent spectre  (Grace Doherty)?

Ostensibly this is a sci fi thriller with supernatural and ecological tentacles, just shy of two and half hours in length. Yes, it's overlong and feels stretched, especially in the second act when it starts to explain itself and irritatingly exposes a medical equivalent of "it was all a dream".structure by the end.

And yet it also has moments of resonance, when the concept is more open-ended,  spanning a life crossing from the twentieth into the twenty first century, possibly the life of a woman whose name is only mentioned  once.

The film and TV references are legion and most obvious - the deserted spaceship, the labyrinthine upper space out of sight in this play up a ladder with a woman taking command  recalls Alien. The uniforms  modelled after those on Space Trek, although more monochrome. The female protagonist bearing the name of a 1940s' movie. But also glimpses of childhood reading -  Treasure Island, Wuthering Heights - and workers' values of another time.

If this had been cut to one act with the opportunity to ratchet up the suspense in a tighter structure, the plot might have felt more fulsome and absorbing. As it is, it feels as put together as the panels in the walls in order to fill the allotted time rather than organically grown. But X just about flickers into an amber light, even if doesn't quite manage to mark the spot.