There are horrors in this evocation of war’s madness, but they accumulate quietly and with stealth. Nicholas Wright’s adaptation of Pat Barker’s 1991 international bestseller — the first in her Regeneration trilogy — harnesses both the bluntness of her prose and its underlying emotional subtlety. Blurring the boundaries between history and fiction, it’s set in 1917 at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland, where servicemen suffering from “war neurosis” were sent to be psychiatrically patched up before being dispatched back to the carnage of the Front. Wright’s play is sometimes shocking; it is also tender and grimly funny. And Simon Godwin’s production gently breaks your heart.
The poet Siegfried Sassoon (played by a darkly intense Tim Delap) has exploded his own small bomb in the heart of the establishment by writing his defiant declaration of disgust with the war. Anxious to spare him the disgrace of a court martial, his friend and fellow writer Robert Graves persuades the authorities that he is mentally unstable, and Sassoon is sent to Craiglockhart. There he is treated by Captain Rivers (Stephen Boxer), whose kindness is embattled by a rigid sense of honour and duty, an inner struggle betrayed by the stammer that creeps into his speech. He also meets Wilfred Owen (Garmon Rhys), himself a fledgling poet, whose admiration for Sassoon discreetly blossoms into a passionate attachment.
Life becomes a peculiar kind of lunacy. A queasy sense of normality, with games of golf, civilised chat and mannerly meals, is ruptured by screaming outbursts or bouts of violent vomiting as patients suffer hallucinatory flashbacks to the trenches. The men — in particular, Bradford-born asthmatic Billy Prior, played with warmth and dry wit by Jack Monaghan — are stalked by a sense of helpless emasculation and, absurdly, as ruled as ever by class distinctions. And Rivers becomes increasingly uneasy about the ethics of his position, especially after witnessing another doctor administering an appallingly cruel electrical treatment to a soldier whose trauma has left him mute.
Boxer beautifully conveys Rivers’s repressed turmoil, countered by the brusque, angry intelligence of Delap’s Sassoon, and Godwin’s fluid staging feels like a surreal, disturbing dream. It’s one that won’t be easy to forget.
Box office: 01604 624811, to Sept 20, then touring to Nov 29