It is rare on a British stage to find a play dealing with contemporary Europe. But this work by Matei Visniec, the exiled Romanian writer, is an impassioned two-hander that encompasses the Bosnian war, victimised women, Balkan man and the Freudian nature of resurgent nationalism. Even if you can sense Visniec ticking off his list of chosen topics, you emerge both intellectually informed and emotionally moved.
The setting of The Body of a Woman as as Battlefield in the Bosnian War is a Nato medical facility on the German border where two women come together in the aftermath of the war.
Dorra, from the former Yuogoslavia, is suffering traumatic neurosis as a result of rape. Kate, a 35-year-old Bostonian who has been working as team pyschologist to a mass-graves commission, is also suffering a nervous crisis.
At first Dorra is deeply suspicious of Kate, imagining she wants to subject her to clinical enquiry. But the two women are drawn together by post-war stress and offer each other healing support. It is only when Kate seeks to adopt Dorra's expected baby that we are reminded of the gulf between American guilt and European experience.
Visniec covers a vast amount of ground in his 105-minute play. In one scene the two women get drunk and play tapes of European music while Dorra catalogues the vices and virtues of all the respective nationalities.
It may be highly contrived but, as female drunk-scenes go, it is 10 times more interesting than the acrobatic display of inebriation in Coward's Fallen Angels.
Visniec's central idea, however, is the one contained in his title: that, in the Balkans, rape is a form of military strategy and that resurgent nationalism is often a form of infantile sadism. Given the horror-stories that came out of Bosnia, it is a perfectly tenable thesis. My only cavil is that Visniec announces it journalistically and then proceeds to illustrate it dramatically.
But Alison Sinclair, who has directed and translated the play for Reality Productions, engages you with the plight of these two women and turns then into something more than symbolic victims.
Sladjana Vujovic as Dorra beautifully charts the conflict between physical revulsion at carrying a child of war and the growth of a defiant maternalism. And Gina Landor, through alertly expressive features, captures the American observer's harrowed identification with European female suffering.
It starts as a thesis-play but it ends by showing theatre's rare capacity to give emotional reality to reported fact.
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