Art Wednesday

Words by Stephen McEwen.

In the wake of the recent WikiLeaks documents re-informing the world of the war crimes committed in Iraq, Palace of the End at the Arcola could not be better timed. Canadian writer Judith Thompson shows to us three individuals’ case studies of war, in an attempt to re-address the run-up to war and the subsequent coalition occupation, shedding a bloody light on the wider bellicose tragedy, and what it really means to be a war casualty.

The play opens with ‘My pyramids’, in which we see the tormented Jessica, based on the story of the now-ex-solider Lynndie England, who was convicted and court-martialled in 2005 for torture and abuse of inmates at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison. Despite the fact that this scene resulted in a slow start for the play, and does pale in comparison with the two which followed it, it is also admittedly one of its more intriguing sequences. Caught in between her experience of war, her love affair in the prison, the public outcry and hate campaign directed against her following the publication of the photos, Jessica, sufficiently played by Jade Williams, strikes a painfully confused and tormented figure, evoking an odd mixture of hate, disbelief, and sympathy from the audience. She defends actions which cannot be defended, citing pressure from her peers, those above, the heady Gulf war mentality, adding an unhealthy dose of jingoistic, vitriolic patriotism, when she discusses her abuses of those ‘apes in Abu Ghraib.’ We see an individual, caught tragically, and to an extent willingly in militaristic fervour, trying to defend herself, when she has now come to represent something so much larger than she could ever imagine. We feel for her and her yet unborn child, aided by highly charged points of emotion succinctly delivered by Williams, yet this always falls short soon enough as patriotism creeps in again, as is the case when she talks about her self-imposed exile to Canada, where she ‘will pray to (her) American God’ everyday, because ‘you don’t mess with the eagle.’

We then move to the slightly calmer, and more familiar setting of Harrowdown Hill, where a now destroyed Dr David Kelly, is in the process of taking his own life following his controversial revealing of information to Andrew Gilligan that the threat of WMDs in Iraq had been exaggerated in order to sway the public in favour of the war. Robin Soans provides a gripping and matured performance, balancing successfully a portrayal of a men racked with guilt over his own role in the war, and then his attempt to regain moral atonement by trying to do the right thing. Soans’ fatherly quality, matched with his monologue being punctuated humanly with anecdotes makes the characters that bit more tragic. More than anything, this scene succeeds in bringing together informative reality and tragedy, shown through a pained human face.

Such a poignant reignites our interest in the performance, and is seen through to the play’s end, by the ‘Instruments of Yearning’ scene. Here we see Nehrjas Al Saffarh, a former high-school teacher, who again comes to embody personal and national pain, in her recounting of the horrors inflicted upon her family before the war, during Saddam’s reign of terror. Conceptually, this brings the play to another level, as it thus avoids the fate of becoming another ‘We hate stupid war-mongering Americans who just wanted oil’ protest play, widening the scope of the tragedy to heighten its impact, and to show a nation, and a woman truly destroyed by a course of history by which they have been so relentlessly attacked. Imogen Smith’s performance is indeed the highlight of the production, the Iraqi date on top of the cake as it were. With poise and an ever engaging presence, she injects moments of humour into what is admittedly a very morose play, bringing the aims of both Judith Thompson and the production company to their acme.

It is very easy for a writer, and indeed a production company, to jump on a theatrical bandwagon, viewing a contemporary event and immediately seeing the commercial and critical kudos teasingly attached to creating a performance based around it. This occasionally leads to a cultural glut, leaving us thinking ‘What did people write before the war?’, yet this is fortunately not the case with Palace of the End. The play straddles successfully drama and documentary, just as informative as it is theatrical, nudging us as individuals to re-evaluate our own opinions and consciences in the continuing aftermath of the war and occupation, by showing us three well-crafted and explosive individuals of war.

Palace of the End runs in Studio 2 at the Arcola from Oct. 26^th – Nov. 20^th.

The Arcola (Click Here)