Home, hope, fear, sacrifice… These are the themes at the heart of Dr Blighty, Nutkhut’s site-specific commission which, for the final week of the Brighton Festival, masterfully commandeered both the exterior of the gloriously oriental folly that is the Brighton Pavilion and its surrounding gardens.

The show is inspired by the extraordinary First World War story that, from 1914 to 1916, saw the Pavilion turned into a 722-bed hospital for soldiers of the Empire as ‘the fashionable promenades of Brighton became the footpaths to recovery for thousands of soldiers from the Indian sub-continent’. Letters home written by the soldiers stationed here are the starting point for the piece.

By day, we can freely wander through Pavilion Gardens, encountering a number of smaller pavilions hosting installation works. The Bedhead Pavilion looks like a bandstand, or a large birdcage, its open sides made from the sort of metal bedsteads that we presume were used in the Pavilion when it was home to thousands of men far from home. Here, we see postcards on strings fluttering in the wind. On the front of the cards, blurry black and white photographs; on the back, messages from present-day visitors sent back into the past. ‘We are so grateful for what you have done for us’ says one, in a delicate script. ‘I am so sorry you were hurt’ says another in a more childish hand.

Over in the Red and Gold Pavilion, a single bed, empty but made up and ready for its occupant. On the bed, a clipboard. Name: Rav Sim. Injury: a bullet to the hip. He’s one of the lucky ones – operated on, recuperating. He might have a bit of a limp, but he has got off lightly compared to some. Coming from the walls are a constant murmuring – the ‘surreal morphine-fuelled dreams of the wounded soldier’.

The White Pavilion is far more disturbing. Buckets of sand. (For what? To mop up the blood and the gore?) Rough hessian sacks dangling from butcher’s hooks. There are speakers inside the sacks, and you have to stay still and close to hear the war-torn sounds and snippets of stories that come through. ‘Tell my brother, for God’s sake don’t enlist’ says one voice, almost drowned out by the sounds of shells exploding.

Outside in the gardens, fragmented stories are conveyed through the medium of vintage brass gramophone horn speakers and gourds. Standing next to one, I hear of the smell of iodine and the burn of sulphur on the skin. In another, stories of arduous journeys from India to Brighton.

At twilight, a team of people of Asian heritage, dressed in period clothing, move across the large lawn to the front of the Pavilion, placing an armada of little diyas – tiny clay bowls, each containing a jewel-coloured nightlight – on the grass. These beautiful diyas have been made at a number of community and schools workshops led by Nutkhut. The quiet action is a lovely moment, and people watch quietly and respectfully (for the most part). The show has also embraced a number of other events including community choirs performing at the ‘bandstand’; two special concerts at the Brighton Dome; and a special commemoration service that included a wreath-laying and dedication of a blue plaque.

As night falls, the culmination of the event – and the part of the Dr Blighty that has got the whole of Brighton talking (and far further afield, courtesy of social media) – a 15-minute video mapping onto the back of the Brighton Pavilion, with accompanying sound composition. This can be seen and heard properly from inside the gardens, and seen (more-or-less) from outside the gardens in the street – or even, as I discovered on the opening night (Tuesday 24th), from across the road and down a side street, outside the Marlborough Theatre. This first casual viewing is enough to show me that what we have here is not the usual sort of video mapping, which is often little more than projection onto a building as if it were a screen. What I can see – even from afar, without my full attention – is that every little architectural detail of the Pavilion, its columns and domes and archways and minarets, is being thought about and truly mapped, a great merging of 2D and 3D.

On the return trip the next night, I watch the video installation properly from within the gardens. It starts with a melodic and melancholic Indian song sung by a male vocalist. The Pavilion is a moody construct of black shadows and old gold lights. Rich jewel colours erupt – emerald green, turquoise, ruby red – and the sound morphs to the babble of children’s voices and the clopping of horses’ hooves. As flutes sound, a magnificent row of shadow-elephants appear, moving from right to left across the whole width of the building. Rainbow-coloured butterflies flutter by, and the Pavilion is now a riot of candy colours – shocking pinks, brilliant blues, sherbet yellows, luscious lilacs.  The mapping at this point is at its superb best – curves and lines and edges picked out with delicate precision. In the medley of sounds, a female voice pushes through into our consciousness: ‘Let this be my parting word…’ Rich lotus blooms erupt all over the building; the soundtrack becomes more mulched, more ominous, and we see images of Indian soldiers marching with flags, moving across the building. We hear the sounds of artillery, the boom of bombs, and the Pavilion is lit up in electric flashes. Then it is red, all red…

The music, composed by Shri Shrivam, holds the balance nicely between traditional Indian song and contemporary composition. Sound designer Ed Carter has worked it all together nicely. Video and animation work by Novak, lighting design by Phil Supple, and projection by QED, prove to be formidable team.

Apart from the beautiful spectacle that is this finale, it is also a very lovely pulling together of ideas and images that are explored collectively throughout the work, in all of the installations.

Soundscape artist Thor McIntyre has done a sterling job with an engaging sound installation delivered through speakers concealed in all sorts of clever ways around the gardens. And the whole thing was envisioned and put into practice by Nutkhut’s artistic director Ajay Chabra and his partner in Nutkhut, Simmy Gupta, working throughout the whole process with designer Tom Piper.

Although the term ’site specific’ is thrown around with gay abandon these days, it is unusual to see a piece of work that is genuinely specific to just one site. This is an example – Dr Blighty is about, and of, Brighton Pavilion, using a full tool-box of physical, visual and verbal storytelling to bring the site alive. It has proved to be an enormous success, news spreading throughout the city and beyond as the week progressed, with this part of Brighton brought to a standstill at the weekend as crowds poured in to see the projections – and when the site was declared full, people were standing in roads, on top of bus shelters, and up trees in an attempt to see the work. Beyond the live event, postings on social media have reached thousands more people.

This is a populist performance work in the best sense of the word. It has been warmly embraced by the people of Brighton who have taken Dr Blighty into their hearts. A fantastic example of the success of outdoor arts that is free to audience, and an amazing end to the Brighton Festival 2016.

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