What does it feel like to be a raw army recruit? Playwright Pamela Carter offers us a glimpse with Lines, which takes its name from the barracks where soldiers live, where their beds are arranged side by side. We meet new boys Locke (Tony Clay), Valentine (Ncuti Gatwa), Perk (Tom Gill) and Mackay (Robbie O’Neill), all keen to get through basic training for different reasons, and all busy measuring themselves against each other, and against Hollywood’s version of what it means to be a real man in which the hero is always making a last stand against the enemy.
“We can’t say they didn’t tell us,” remarks Locke when the going gets tough, but have they been told what all this training is for in a changing political climate? If you’ve been trained to kill on order and if necessary to sacrifice yourself, where does the energy and frustration go when the lines are redrawn and you may never see active service? This year is the first for more than a century that British troops are not engaged in combat somewhere in the world.
Carter’s script is clever and Jay Miller’s production is as much choreographed as it is directed. Combined with video and sound, this creates an oddly thrilling sense of both being inside the men’s heads and observing them dispassionately as they gradually change, individually, in their relationship to each other, and as a unit.
The stage is never still. The men are constantly dressing and undressing, both in reality and metaphorically; they stare into mirrors that reflect them back on themselves as if entranced by their own heroism or self-doubt; they do vicious one-armed combat with the bed clothes. The cast are cracking, and the show combines a compelling dream-like intensity with a vigorous energy as it shows men falling in and out of line.
• At the Yard, London, until 21 November.
