I have heard readings from Pink Mist a number of times at literary festivals, and I have a much-read copy at home, so I wondered if this production might prove to be to be too familiar an experience. I should not have been so pessimistic, for this production is an astonishingly powerful piece of theatre. Pink Mist started life as a BBC Radio 4 verse-drama in 2012 and the following year it was shortlisted for the BBC Audio Drama Awards. It won the Hay Festival Poetry Medal and the Wales Book of the Year in 2014. It was premiered as a stage play in Bristol last year, and has now returned triumphantly to the Old Vic as part of their 250th Anniversary season.
It tells the story of three young Bristol boys, friends since primary school, who enlist in the army to escape the banality and tick-tock drudgery of civilian life. Arthur has been driving cars off the container ships at Portbury docks: ‘… parking them in perfect lines, like headstones in a cemetery… Every day. Every week. Every month.’ Geraint – inevitably known as Taff – has been working as an apprentice, ‘on crap pay to a St Paul’s plumber’, and he is hungry for something different. Their half-Somali pal Hads is unfulfilled in his job in a clothing outlet at Cribbs Causeway: ‘I mean, what’s next after Next?’ Boredom is the spur that drives them to join up; they are ‘Not going someplace but leaving somewhere’. Off they go to Catterick for ‘the beastings and learnings and drills’, and before very long they find themselves in Afghanistan.
Much of the play’s solid authenticity arises from the many hours Sheers spent interviewing men just like Arthur, Taff and Hads, but he gives the women in their lives a voice too, vividly depicting the collateral damage that soldiering can inflict on wives, mothers and girlfriends. Sheers language is a delicately balanced amalgam of imaginative lyricism and earthy Bristolian vernacular, and he employs both to devastating effect. He is particularly adept at describing the less tangible consequences of front-line experience. For example, when on leave Arthur reads a list of ‘Jägerbombs’ on a bar menu and is suddenly overwhelmed by the memory of having seen an American soldier engulfed in flames running blindly into a wall, trying hopelessly to ‘stub himself out’. Arthur’s mental scars may be invisible, but they cause real pain.
Phil Dunster plays ‘King’ Arthur, a likeable lad who at sixteen had a passion for collecting birds’ eggs – their beauty and fragility echoing the vulnerability of the young soldiers’ lives. Dunster gives a commanding performance that ranges across boyish enthusiasm, through aggression, anger and, finally, tenderness and quiet reflection. His is the dominant role, but this is still very much an ensemble piece. Peter Edwards and Alex Stedman are excellent as the friends who are only too eager to follow Arthur’s lead and enlist, turning from fun-loving boys into men, each damaged in his own way. Rebecca Hamilton gives a touching performance as Arthur’s girlfriend Gwen, sadly aware that she had lost him from the moment he signed the form. Zara Ramm depicts the bewildered howling grief of a mother struggling to come to terms with her son’s injuries, the kind euphemistically termed ‘life changing’. And Rebecca Killick is equally moving as Lisa, married to a man who can no longer cope with ‘normal’ life. Co-directors John Retallack and George Mann have created tightly choreographed sequences where all six actors move together, often depicting battlefield action where each gesture is underpinned by sound designer Jon Nicholls’ effects – the whine of ricochets, the shattering blast of an IED. Featuring split-second timing and highly atmospheric lighting from Peter Harrison, these sequences are masterful in both their precision and their power to move.
In the draft preface to a collection of poems that he hoped he might live to publish in 1919, Wilfred Owen made it clear that he was not at all concerned with ‘deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The poetry is in the pity.’ Nearly a century later and with similar intent, Owen Sheers has again found poetry in the pity of war, and he has done so magnificently. I left the theatre feeling deeply grateful that neither of my boys followed the path taken by Arthur and his friends. Pink Mist is unmissable. ★★★★★ Mike Whitton 18th February 2016
