The power of the opening scene of Caryl Churchill's 50-minute play derives from what is unseen: the violence stumbled upon by teenager Joan (Laura Murphy) outside her aunt Harper's house. As Harper (Jane Brennan) tries to persuade her that it's all innocuous, Joan's questioning becomes more insistent. The tension rises and, in Bedrock's production, is marvellously sustained by these performances. Behind the two actors, a blank video screen allows our imaginations to take off.
Churchill's dystopian vision is given superb theatrical expression in the play's central scene, a bizarre hat parade in which orange-clad prisoners shuffle towards their deaths wearing exotic headgear, their silhouettes projected behind them into infinity. The fact that the hats will be destroyed along with "the bodies" is the only cause of concern to the two young milliners, Todd (Barry Ward) and the older Joan, who do not witness the parade. This disturbing extension of Churchill's suggestion that what we don't see does not exist is made all the more effective by the sympathetic portrayal of the burgeoning relationship between the two, directed with subtlety by Jimmy Fay.
The difficulty of the leap, in the play's final scene, to a world of total war is reflected in Fay's over-reliance on projected video imagery. While the script is attuned to current ecological as well as political anxieties, and sharply satirises the language and logic of international alliances - "The cats have come in on the side of the French" - there is a dramatic lacuna here, as if this was a sketch rather than a fully realised conclusion arising logically from what preceded it. As if to compensate, Fay's images of destruction and catastrophe become overwhelming and reductive. The strength of Churchill's language is its ambiguity; by showing us so much, so insistently, Fay lets the image have the last word.
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