THE WAR IS DEAD LONG LIVE THE WAR. To 20 September.

London

THE WAR IS DEAD LONG LIVE THE WAR
by Patrick Jones

ICA Theatre To 20 September 2003
Mon-Sat 8pm
Runs 1hr 10min No interval

TICKETS: 020 7930 3647
Review: Timothy Ramsden 15 September

Good cause; pity about the play.Each performance of Patrick Jones' play is preceded by a speaker from the Stop the War Coalition, advertising their march and rally on September 27 (12 noon, Hyde Park to march to Trafalgar Square. www.stopwar.org.uk). On Monday, this included the evening's keenest argument. If only the hour that followed had achieved the same concentration of ideas. Instead, alas, it's stultifying.

Two things ruin this strange meeting of two soldiers, one from the Iraq invasion, the other left over from the First World War. The first is generalisation. They meet on a low, extensive and anonymous platform and within a few moments of light gradually emerging on to the dark where modern-day White is storming furiously around, it's clear this is no earthly meeting. Yet drama is unforgivingly demanding of the concrete. How does Great War Black know the Wilfred Owen poems he repeatedly quotes most weren't published till after the war in which he died?

When Black leaves, his replacement in this limbo gives him a postcard to send. Will this be posted in 1918, in 2003 or some other, ethereal letter-box? If you want to be taken seriously, you have to take your audience seriously.

Far more damaging is the numbingly obvious writing. It indicates either that better educated men were privates in 1918 than now or that the massive expansion of information since then has produced mental zombies among the working-class (or non-working; White, tritely if neatly - enough, joined up to earn money to repair the roof at home). 1918's private soldier quotes poetry, thinks rationally; today's squaddy's someone for whom a Sun headline would constitute philosophical depth.

To escape this purgatorial limbo Black must find someone to denounce politicians' warmongering decisions. White seems unpromising and Jones isn't the dramatist to get round the problem. A sudden metamorphosis with recall of an atrocity killing a child in a farm kitchen - is exploitatively abused to swing things around.

To justify such horrors cropping up in a play needs more depth than this piece manages. And conscientious objection, with its consequences, has been explored with far more power and depth in, for example, Les Smith's Some Kind of Hero. Jones hasn't written a play in any but the most basic of senses. He's provided an animated placard simplistic, lurid and overdrawn. It may warm the sympathies of the already sympathetic (a valid function). But even in this manner it might have a lot more about it than the obvious ready-to-hand elements thrown together here. The performers do their best. There's an ear-shattering explosion at the end.

Black: Paul Amos
White: Chris Leonard

Director: Sally Ann Gritton
Lighting: Estelle Rickleton
Music: James Dean Bradfield

2003-09-17 08:56:25