The Trench

Something rotten stalks the crumbling tunnels beneath the trenches of WWI – a product of the stench of death and excrement; of the "sounds which crawl deep down within the mind." In this latest production, the award-winning Les Enfant Terribles craft an image of hell forged in the ruined minds of the men sent to the fields of France to die. It's theatre which cuts deep and doesn't heal until long after the curtain has gone down.

At its solid heart, this is a sound piece of writing: ostensibly a quest narrative of the homesick, lovesick traveller, yet set against a war whose waste no reparations can either justify or redeem. Oliver Lansley's script gives this 20th century Ulysses the full force of man-made destruction amplified to epic proportions. But there's an immediacy to this production which means it's only afterwards these resonances begin to ring and multiply.

One might distinguish two notable worthies in a pantheon of successes. The first is the stunningly inventive use of props, puppets and physicality. Theirs is a hell with uncanny ghouls and tunnel walls that bear down all too oppressively. The second is Alexander Wolfe's live music, which outs the singer-songwriter as a sensitive collaborator with a strong sense of the dramatic form. 

In this joint Jubilee and Olympic year, Britain's recent past seems intent on ossifying into a Keep Calm and Carry On cartoon of itself. Here, however, the mythical arena of "times long past" provides space for an examination of our history which is at once mournfully distant and pressingly modern.