The Flood

A murky addition to the tide of First World War-inspired work this year, this is a genuinely uncomfortable play. Crowded in a tiny, brick cellar, the audience undergo a prolonged assault on the ears, eyes, and occasionally the emotions.

Badac Theatre Company claims Antonin Artaud as a formative influence, and makes full use of his emphasis on physical violence and ritualistic images. A nurse in full regalia picks up grotesque slivers of liver, dividing them between “dead”, the “blighty” and the stitched up “back you go”. The other weapon in her emotive arsenal is a steel rolling pin which is thudded on her operating bench to simulate artillary fire while a few yards away, a grey-haired Tommy curses and shakes.

He talks in stark, disjointed phrases about the horrors of collecting the dead from No Man’s Land – so many “parts of pals.” The nurse recounts, in similar style, her dreams of saving him from increasingly horrific wounds, and in increasingly horrific conditions. Together, their disjointed narratives, full of abstracts, become another kind of bombardment. They shelter from the insanity, blood, and screaming in a cottage of their own invention – a tweely romantic fantasy with two kids and lots of laughter.

This is the pain of war reduced to abstracts; a soldier’s trauma, and the heartbreak of courageous lovers separated under bombardment. The images are undoubtedly powerful, but the humanity and humour underneath them feels a little faint – as the less courageous audience members might, pressed close in grim conditions. 

 

http://festival14.summerhall.co.uk/event/the-flood/