A group of men stand in a line, each holding a sheet of paper with his name written on it. Lou. David. Ruben. Sukrim. Gabriel. Marcelo.

Lou and David, tall and broad shouldered, look like retired British soldiers, which they are. Royal Marines. They look and sound like ex-Marines, but they are now both PhDs; one a psychologist specialising in war trauma, and one a special needs teacher who is also an expert on the philosophy of colour. Sukrim is much shorter. He’s a Gurkha who was trained in jungle warfare in Brunei, has travelled the world, and was brought over to fight in the Falklands. The Malvinas. Ruben is a survivor of the sinking of the General Belgrano, having spent 41 hours adrift in the South Atlantic on a raft, witnessing death all around him. He is also the founder of the Beatles tribute band Get Back Trio, who have played at The Cavern in Liverpool. Gabriel was a conscript to the Argentine army who fought in the Battle of Wireless Ridge. He became a lawyer, and he also lectures on the Malvinas in Argentinean schools. Marcelo was also a conscript soldier – like the other Argentines, just 19 years old when called to war. He’s shorter and broader than his two countrymen, with a muscly torso. He led a troubled life post-war, although saved himself through sports training, and now takes part in triathlons. He talks of the fear they had of the Gurkhas, who were rumoured to be hacking Argentinians to pieces and eating their ears.

Lou is telling us the story of returning to Buenos Aires, many years after the Falklands War ended, to make this show. He talks about being met at Buenos Aires airport not by an Argentine holding a gun to his head, but by a smiling person holding a piece of paper bearing his name. The rehearsals took longer than the war did, he says, and we chuckle.  74 days, that’s how long the war lasted. He’d been garrisoned on the Falklands, before the war broke out, and he’d been taken prisoner, then later returned there to fight on, and then he’d gone back for the 25-year reunion. But now he was heading to Argentina to work with theatre-maker Lola Arias – who is Argentinean, and was just just 6 years old in 1982 when the Falklands War / Guerra de Las Malvinas (the surtitles studiously switch between the two) took place. But she knew all about it.  As we learn in the play, Argentinean children are taught about the Malvinas in school, and learn to sing the March of the Malvinas. It is very much a current political issue. Unlike English schoolchildren, who are taught nothing about the war or the history behind it, or of Argentine’s current position – and let’s face it, is there anybody out there who gives two hoots about the Falklands nowadays?

David has a bit of a penchant for dressing up in ladies’ clothing to entertain his mates. This is subverted very nicely in the play as he morphs into Margaret Thatcher, mouthing recordings of her famous nation-rallying speeches.  On the opposite side of the stage – both of these human puppets projected onto the back screen – we see General Galtieri. When Thatcher speaks, the words on the surtitles are in Spanish. When Galtieri speaks, in English. Falklands. Malvinas. War. Guerra. Malvinas. Falklands.

The play on language throughout is beautiful – not only the constant swapping between English and Spanish in live and recorded words, surtitled accordingly, but the added wild card of having a Nepalese Gurkha included. His English is still laboured and delivered with a heavy accent. His foreign-ness, his otherness, is presented to us for what it is, another odd twist in this story of colonialism and disputed territory, in which language, and the naming of things, and the power of words, plays such a key part. Many years after the Falklands conflict, we learn, after a long fight for his rights, Sukrim now has UK citizenship.

It is a very clever piece of theatre. You read the blurb, and you think it’s going to be a verbatim piece: three British servicemen and three Argentines from the armed forces, all of whom are veterans of the Falklands/Malvinas war, are brought together onstage. But Lola Arias is far too clever a theatre-maker for mere verbatim. Yes, there are spoken stories, reminiscences presented straight out to the audience, but in this very theatrical piece of theatre, we also get a loud and traumatic drum solo to signify the sinking of the Belgrano; a full-on heavy metal tirade against war; a mock-TV panel show on the alleged eating of ears; and a version of In the Psychiatrists’s Chair.

The interplay between live stage action, found film, and live-feed video is brilliantly executed, using theatrical techniques that Arias collectively calls ‘re-enactment’. Collages of TV news footage from the UK and from Argentina flip by to illustrate or contrast with stories told verbally; newspaper photos that are re-enacted by the very people in those photos, right here and now, in odd little physical theatre vignettes that have a sorrowful look of children playing war games. The re-enacted speeches of the warmongering leaders, the live rock and roll numbers that punctuate the play…

There’s a great balance between hard to stomach moments, and light and playful moments. The drum solo (by Ruben) is an intense and harrowing moment; but it contrasts with the ironic humour of Ruben’s stories about a rather idiosyncratic grasp of English based only on knowing the words to the Beatle songs that Ringo sings. I am the drummer, so I need to know Ringo’s songs, says Ruben – and demonstrates with  a charming version of With A Little Help From My Friends. All of this is typical of the lightness that Arias allows into her work, whilst never shying away from the really dark and nasty things that have to be dealt with.

She’s clever, very clever. She leads us in gently, with everyone in jolly reunion story-telling mode. We get cheery accounts of everyone’s basic biographies, and the bare facts of their war experiences. They are all mates now, it’s all in the past. As the play progresses, the stories of what they actually felt when the really horrible things happened emerge slowly, at a pace we can handle. What it really feels like to kill someone. What it’s like to search a dead body for intelligence. What happens when you come home after war and you suddenly haven’t got a job and end up as an addict in a psychiatric hospital. What it’s like to stand in a pub where everyone is singing your praises, but the only person you can talk to is the World War Two veteran at the bar, because they are the only person who has a clue what you’re going through.

Always, Arias takes care of her audience (as I am sure she takes care of her performers). There is no one onstage other than these six ‘non actors’, who are trusted to carry the play, and do so magnificently. The creation and rehearsal process was long and thorough, and they have worked as a collaborative team to create this extraordinary piece of work. Whatever is needed, they do, these six men who are now one unit, working together on the job. They tell stories of fights and flights, they do press-ups, they operate the live-feed cameras, they dress up, they dress down, they open maps on-camera, they lovingly place a green woollen blanket in shot so that it becomes a mossy landscape, they drag the drum kit on and off, they form a band.

Minefield is not a play about ‘what really happened’ in 1982 in the South Atlantic. It is a play about memory – about what remains years later, about the stories we choose to tell, and about the stories that we discover we have to tell. It is a play about how human beings survive and guard their sanity through continuously interrogating and re-evaluating their memories. It is a wonderful piece of theatre, one that it has been hard to write about, as all I really want to say is: just go and see this, it is brilliant, totally brilliant.

Featured image by Tristram-Kenton

Who is Stella? What is she?

Let’s start (as we should) with the show itself; with what Neil Bartlett chooses to give us.

A man, stage left, our right, sitting on a chair in front of the glorious red velvet curtains of the Theatre Royal. A man in black, sitting perfectly still. He stands, he places a hand under the curtain, and the curtain rises, as if by his magical command, Who is this man? Servant? Master? Magician? Funeral director?

We see a stage within the stage; a kind of large podium. A man (a different one) sits on a chair. This man is middle-aged, besuited and anxious. The stage is black and bare, except for two chairs, a light bulb on a long flex, and a row of lights at the back, off centre, that look like an exaggerated take on those light bulbs you get around the mirrors in dressing rooms.

Ah, mirrors! Mirrors are important to this production. We are told by the anxious sitting man that there are no mirrors here – all the mirrors are covered. We hear the crash of breaking glass, and a narrative as fragmented as a shattered mirror emerges. Waiting for a cab at 7pm. A hand smashing into the glass. A mirror covered with a cloth.

Another person enters. He. She. Ze. They. Take your pick – we live in an age when (although things aren’t perfect) there is at least an option for choosing the pronoun by which you’d like to be known. This person is Stella. Stella has bare legs and arms, and masculine shoulders. Stella has a lovely round and pretty face, fluffy blonde hair, a feminine voice. Stella is wearing a silk gown that is a sort of kimono. She sits, and as she talks, she takes out a hand-held mirror and does her make-up. It’s her birthday. She’s waiting to be collected. She has a lover called Arthur who is not that handsome and a bit nervous and sweaty – but he is rich. Her mother approves. This story is set a hundred years before Marilyn will sing Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend, but her spirit is channelled here. The light reflected from the mirror in her hand bounces around the stage and auditorium, a fast-moving butterfly fluttering hither and thither.

The two characters on the podium chairs – one constant as young Stella, the other vacillating between a number of voices: the scared aristocratic lover Arthur, who disappears when Stella is arrested; an older Stella reflecting on the past; and Stella’s alter-ego / birth persona Ernest Boulton. Often, the two actors are delivering monologues cleverly intercut so that there are echoes of words and feelings picked up on by the other. Occasionally there is dialogue. Circling around them is the man we first met raising the curtain. In the programme credits he is called The Attendant. He watches. He witnesses. He sometimes brings things to Stella – a pair of shoes, a tray of cosmetics.

Neil Bartlett gives us Stella’s personal story, a specific individual tale of liberation, oppression, and fighting to be seen as who you choose to be, set in the 19th century; yet this is also a kind of playfully anachronistic leap in and out of other times – with the thoughts and words of famous contemporary experimenters with gender and image, including Bette Bourne and Scottee, allowed to inform the script. Yes, things are different now. But we’ve still a way to go.

All three actors are brilliant in their roles. Richard Cant brings age and experience to the stage. He speaks quietly, forcing you to really listen to him. Oscar Batterman, who graduated from Guildhall School of Music and Drama only last year, is a perfect choice for young Stella. He captures the delicate balance between brash boyish exuberance and girlish coquettishness that Stella plays out, and with, so effectively. David Carr is ideal as the attendant – an efficient and subservient butler, yet somehow also the puppet-master in the background.

I have a conversation with myself about the decision to cast a black actor in this ‘servant’ role. Is it racist of me even to notice? Is there a sub-text about there being other issues of identity and liberation from oppression that will also need to be played out in the 19th and 20th centuries, alongside issues of gender? I think about scrapping this paragraph from this review – but I’ve kept it in, in the interests of honesty, because even now, in the liberated 21st century, when we see bodies on stage, we note that they are ‘male’ or ‘female’ or ‘young’ or ‘old’ or ‘black’ or ‘white’. We do not see neutral bodies. Will we ever?

Stella is written and directed by Neil Bartlett. And if there is one thing you can say about Bartlett, it’s that he knows his stuff. His productions vary wildly in style and form, but what they have in common is the care and precision with which everything is done. Nothing unnecessary is left in. Everything onstage – words, physical action, visual tableaux, lights, sounds – is beautifully executed. He’s never afraid to use stillness, to take his time. A lesson in contemporary dramaturgy.

I think it is fair to say that this is a production where the programme notes are a useful addition to understanding the context of the play. Best read afterwards, of course – but having some information on Ernest Boulton’s biography is helpful to enhance and inform the experience witnessed onstage. But this is extra: the show is complete in itself.

What we are presented with is a story of a shattered life, in which the beautiful Stella, although a victim, shines out brilliantly and soars above her troubles, be they arrest and harassment, abandonment by scared lovers, or the far more mundane but just as nasty experience of losing your good looks as you age, and having to reappraise who you are, and reinvent yourself continuously. There is also the less glamorous but equally interesting story of Arthur, and the choices he makes. His ‘cowardice’ – if we can call it that – as he abandons Stella in her hour of need is hardly to be condemned in the circumstances. He, like Stella, is a victim of oppression.

Wouldn’t it be dreadful if this were a real story, we are asked, onstage numerous times, and in the programme notes. Well, it is…

It is dreadful that such things happened. Heartbreaking. It is also an honour to witness the stories of those who fought the battles that paved the way for the changes in society that our generation is benefitting from. More work to be done, but great leaps have been made – we stand on Stella’s shoulders. A heroine for our times.

Zvizdal, the latest work by Belgian company BERLIN follows in the footsteps of Bonanza, which controversially won a Total Theatre Award, causing consternation to those who considered it to be a documentary film rather than ‘theatre’, as there are no performers (although there are visible artist-technicians). But Bonanza and Zvizdal, which are both in the company’s Holocene series of projects that focus on a city or geographical region, are most definitely theatre in my book, unless you want to call them pieces of time-based live art. Either way – what’s in a name? – the audience and the artists are brought together in a shared space, for a fixed duration of time. The unconventional set-up of the space, and the use of 3-D models and live-feed projection in the pieces cause us to continually re-evaluate our relationship between live and screened action; and between fact and fiction. Most of what we are seeing might be on screen, but the liveness of the event is vital. We are here together to witness this.

We enter the space to see a traverse setting. Two banks of seating facing each other, with an enormous white screen dividing the space, and below the screen three stations – podiums bearing models of a farm in three seasons, a green and vibrant spring/summer scene, a snowy winter landscape, and a brown and withered autumn. A kind of robot camera is poised to wander between the three scenes, and to the side a mixing desk/editing console with two people behind it.

The show starts with an on-screen white-out, and we hear what we assume is a woman speaking to various Russian officials. Her tone is cheery and determined – she is obviously not going to take no for an answer, but is always upbeat and polite. The English subtitles on the blank white screen translate for us: she needs to get a permit to go into The Zone – the area around Chernobyl that was evacuated post-nuclear disaster in 1986, and is now (allegedly) deserted. No, I can’t give you a permit. There are no permits. No one lives there. You can’t go there. Who can give me a permit? Doors open and close, steps are climbed, and eventually she gets her way. Permit granted. The journey has started. The white-out takes on texture, becomes a fuzzy snowy scene, then in a beautiful and startling moment, the screen switches to a vibrant scene of green fields, blossoming flowers, singing birds, and buzzing insects. Welcome to Chernobyl. Zvizdal, to be precise – one of a number of tiny villages within the 30-mile radius of the Chernobyl reactor.

The first shock is the abundance of wildlife. This is no desolate wasteland, it is nature run amok in the absence of farmers and tamers. The second shock is that there are people here, including the subjects of this extraordinary show, a couple in their eighties called Nadia and Petro Opanossovitch Lubenoc. I only know their names from the programme notes. On screen, they refer to each other as Baba (her) and The Old One (him). We first encounter them sitting silently side by side, slapping the flies away. Baba thinks the USA sent over all the flies. She grumbles about her aches and pains. The Old One jokes that he’s too old to run after the girls, but that in any case, he’s always been faithful to his Baba. We see them walking, painfully, around their overgrown farm. They hack at the long grass. They engage in a Beckett-esque circular conversation about whether to plant the potatoes or not. They bemoan the lack of oats, which were too wet to harvest. There is no electricity – they hoe and plough using their own (slowly declining) energy. They have one old lame horse, one skinny cow, a pig, a few chickens, a dog, a cat. There is an ongoing battle about the gate. He keeps leaving it open. She keeps closing it and securing it with wire. Oh God… she says repeatedly, holding her back. There are conversations about their daughter, who doesn’t visit very often. Their daughter wants them to leave Zvizdal and live with her. The Old One is starting to think the daughter might be right. He’s getting too old for the hammering of stakes and the milking and ploughing and harvesting of their meagre crops. But Baba is adamant. The only way they’ll get her out of there is in a coffin.

We visit them over many seasons (BERLIN went to Zvizdal numerous times between 2011 and 2016) and we see them in the midsummer sunshine and in the midwinter snowdrifts. We never see inside their house – that is the contract that the artists have with them. We are taken for a walk around the village. There’s the post office. Closed. And the community centre. Closed, overgrown. And here’s the bus stop – or at least, it was a bus stop when there were buses to stop. There is no television because there is no electricity. There are no phone lines or mobile phone signals. If you’re here, you’re here with no way to contact the rest of the world. It’s not an easy life, but for the old couple it is what they know, so they have refused to be relocated by the government. They were born here, and they will die here.

One one occasion, we are not with the old couple, we are in the car with the BERLIN filmmakers in the middle of a desolate white landscape, trees heaving with the weight of the snow. A number of men in black uniforms signal for the car to stop, and the screen goes to white-out. Then, on comes the camera again and we drive off, leaving soldiers and dogs staring after us. On another occasion it is springtime, May, and a festival day. Baba hails the passing cars, and greets the visitors to the village. A posse of old Baba Yagas in colourful headscarves and yellowing teeth exchange blessings and stories. Then everyone drives off. There will be no more visitors for another year. ‘It was OK when the neighbour was alive,’ says The Old One, wistfully.

There has been so much change. And over the years that we visit them, more things change. The horse, the cow, and the dog die. It is only a matter of time until one or other of the old people die. But who will go first, and what will the other one do then?

Zvizdal takes us right into the heart of the old couple’s story, but cleverly always remind us of the fiction, the theatricality of documentation. The cuts, the screen white-outs. The sudden loud brash music of the soundtrack. The homing in on the 3-D models, so that the ‘real’ scene is replaced onscreen by the ‘toy’ scene. Then there is another layer of artificiality, or playing with reality if you prefer to think of it that way, as the filmed footage and the filming of the model scenes are merged, creating odd onscreen hybrids. Always, we are reminded, this is theatre, this is storytelling. And of course, as is the case in all the best theatre, the Brechtian dissociations that remind us of the artificialities hammer home the truths. By detaching ourselves momentarily, we can take stock, then fall deeper into the tales being told.

It is heartbreaking, astounding, soul-enriching, beautiful work. BERLIN have once again shown us how extraordinary it is to be human; what bizarre and amazing choices human beings make in their lives. They also show is what it means to witness, to truly witness. It is the essence of theatre.

Postscript: there is a coda to the tale that you access online through a code given to you as you leave the theatre. It had me in tears…