Pink Mist, Bush Theatre, London, review: Conveys the trauma of war with devastating impact

Owen Sheers' verse-drama on three young friends in Afghanistan eloquently fuses the topical and the timeless

Alex Stedman, Phil Dunster and Peter Edwards in 'Pink Mist' (Mark Douet)

The impact of Owen Sheers' verse-drama is cumulatively devastating in this immaculately staged and performed production by John Retallack and George Mann. Three young friends from Bristol (Arthur, Taff, and Hads) join the army and are deployed to Afghanistan. The play is acute about the terrible double bind. They enlist to escape from home and dead-end jobs (“what's next after Next?”) but none of them returns in one piece physically or psychologically and the women left to pick up the pieces are themselves casualties of war.

The fact that traumatic memories of Afghanistan continue to ambush the combatants with shocking suddenness as they struggle to adjust to civilian life in Bristol is stunningly conveyed in the spare, fluid, dream-like staging where the terrific, tightly drilled cast express themselves in synchronised movement and where the harrowing pain of the flashbacks is underscored by the suggestive sound and lighting designs of, respectively, Jon Nicholls and Peter Harrison. The rhythmic patterning of the verse, delivered with a ripe Bristolian lilt, gives the story and its insights into the war-fomenting cycle of love, grief and revenge, an immemorial feel, eloquently fusing the topical and the timeless. Not to be missed.

To 13 February; 020 8743 5050. Then Bristol Old Vic 15 Feb to 5 March; 0117 987 7877

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