During the violent chaos following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a woman whose husband is missing receives a phone call from his number. Brief relief implodes when the speaker is not him but a stranger revealing that this device has been found beside a corpse covered by a tarpaulin.
This is one of numerous shattering anecdotes in a play by Dash Arts, based on work by The Reckoning Project, which collects verbatim testimony from conflict victims with the aim of bringing prosecutions for war crimes.
As one of the judgments by lawyers is whether invader behaviour meets “the torture threshold”, the material is inevitably disturbing. A testifier mimes the “three knot” restraint, in which he was suspended from a ceiling with ropes tied in places likely to trigger involuntary movements. In a post-apocalyptic moment, a man walking through miles of ravaged land encounters a distressed stranger and realises that they are the only two survivors from a vast area.
Co-writers Anastasiia Kosidii and Josephine Burton take us back, beyond the headline death tolls and so far performative international diplomacy, to a few indelibly brutal details of what Putin’s land-grab entailed. So horrific are the reminiscences that there is sensibly a softening framework in which a Stoyanka survivor prepares a Ukrainian summer salad – chopping tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes and dill in real time – while talking to a Ukrainian journalist.
Though well played by Tom Godwin and Marianne Oldham, the use of British actors in the central roles can reduce the regional specificity of the story, with Ukrainian performers Simeon Kylsyi and Olga Safronova playing multiple small roles and also doubling as emcees. It might be intriguing to see a performance in which the acting pairs were swapped.
The piece ends with a quasi-Eucharistic distribution of tubs of salad. (Not the batch created on stage, presumably for hygiene reasons.) Delicious as it is, the parting gift cannot expel the terrible taste in the mouth from the forensic charge-sheet against the Russian invaders that, the piece reminds us, must be remembered even when a likely Russia-friendly “peace” is eventually agreed.
At the Arcola theatre, London, until 28 June
