Whole Hog productions have brought Adriano Shaplin’s military drama Pugilist Specialist to the Alma Tavern. This play was met with critical acclaim when it premiered back in 2003, and it has garnered many awards since. Its characters are four US Marines who are involved in a covert operation to assassinate ‘the Bearded Lady’, a mysterious figure who appears to be a foreign leader not unlike Saddam Hussein. A particularly striking quality is the denseness of the language. All four soldiers verbally spar with each other, each displaying a talent for deploying pithy aphorisms that belies the idea that they are ‘grunts’. The dialogue is seldom mundane; even something as ordinary as a hot-dog is described as the ‘re-ordered flesh of a once noisy creature’. In this production the brilliance of the language is handled very well by all four of the cast, though there are times when they are a little heavy-handed with their American accents.
Molly Campbell is excellent as Lieutenant Stein, the only woman in the group. We learn that Stein’s attractiveness was once exploited by the army’s PR people; she has been through the media mill, having starred in a video about minority groups in the armed forces. She has polished her teeth more frequently than her boots, but now she is determined to be known for her military expertise as an explosives specialist. When asked to explain why she has arrived very early for a briefing she snaps back, ‘My punctuality is my feminism.’ Campbell portrays an intensely focused woman, eager to take responsibility and in love with order and procedure.
Lieutenant Freud is the group’s sniper. Initially he appears to be the rather clichéd figure of an undisciplined macho slob, surely destined to come into conflict with uptight feminist Lieutenant Stein. Their sharp interchanges are a highlight, and their relationship proves to be rather more nuanced than one might at first expect. Ross Scott brings considerable physical bulk to the role; he is very convincing as a soldier with a very considerable appetite for hot-dogs, but with no interest whatsoever in the enemy, other than in seeing them as targets.
Lieutenant Studdard, played by Liam Wyatt, is a communications expert who claims to have joined the army to avoid having to think for himself. Nevertheless, he shares his fellow soldiers’ knack of dropping gnomic statements into every conversation: ‘I consider all rhetorical questions to be accusations’ is one example, and, ‘The blind are condemned to a life of eavesdropping’ is another. Wyatt portrays him as a man who listens to the radio chatter of other people all day, but who prefers to keep his own counsel. What he really thinks remains unknown.
Even more enigmatic is the quartet’s senior officer, Colonel Johns. He embodies the contradictions and paradoxes inherent in ‘the war on terror’. How can you supposedly respect a foreign culture while attempting to impose your own values upon it? How can you mount a military campaign with conviction when your own people are deeply divided about its purpose and its morality? Ashley Robson does well to convey the complexity of this character, though some lines would be better delivered in a less declamatory style.
Pugilist Specialist is undeniably a ‘wordy’ play. Shaplin is so keen to pack each line with a startling image or an amusing witticism that it all becomes rather static. It has a great deal to say about a whole range of topics, not the least being gender politics, but as a depiction of a ‘black ops’ mission it is often rather hard going. I could not help doubting if any group of US Marines has ever featured such a verbose bunch of individuals. Whole Hog’s talented cast work hard to bring these soldier-poets to life, and there is a satisfyingly tense conclusion to their assassination attempt, but I would have liked less emphasis upon ideas and more upon character development. However, there is no doubt that Pugilist Specialist is a thought-provoking play that explores a wide range of challenging issues. ★★★☆☆ Mike Whitton 7th March 2017
