We know virtual reality is changing entertainment: it features prominently, for example, in this UK premiere of Lindsey Ferrentino’s play, which is accompanied by an immersive VR installation in the foyer after the show. But it was news to me that VR is used to treat soldiers experiencing PTSD. In Ferrentino’s play, Jess has returned home to Florida’s Space Coast after a third tour of duty in Afghanistan: her face and body are badly burned and she is in chronic pain, struggling to walk or turn her head. Ugly Lies the Bone charts her efforts to heal physically, and – harder still – to face the emotional challenges of homecoming: a reality that doggedly resists virtual solutions.
Having premiered in New York in 2015, the play is now given a hi-tech production by Indhu Rubasingham, the entire curving, craterous stage of which becomes a giant screen each time Jess dons her VR goggles. Over 90 minutes, scenes of her reintegration into hometown life are intercut with therapy sessions, immersing Jess in a paradisiacal virtual world that relieves her pain. She dreams of a mountainous snowscape; her unseen therapist brings it to digital life around her – and before our eyes, too, courtesy of video designer Luke Halls.
It’s spectacular. But neither play nor production are ideal adverts for the wonders of virtual reality. Yes, it helps Jess get back on her feet. But Ferrentino casts growing doubt on the claims made for the treatment by an evangelical therapist who promises Jess she can be “as powerful as the stars”. The production’s wraparound visuals are a red herring, too. This is in part a play about staying afloat in a town of foreclosed homes and jobs lost at the local Nasa base, so it’s uneasily served by glossy, high-end production. The VR sequences are striking but incidental; as Jess realises, the serious business is happening in the real world, not the fantasy realm.
There, Kate Fleetwood’s demobbed gunner lives with her protective sister Kacie (Olivia Darnley), while at loggerheads with Kacie’s boyfriend, Kelvin (Kris Marshall), and tentatively rekindling an old flame of her own. Ferrentino gives a tough but tender – if slight – account of Jess’s struggle to reintegrate, as friends tread on eggshells around her brutalised body, and Jess herself must reimagine who she is and what life can now be. The same – not coincidentally – goes for her home town. The launch of America’s last space shuttle forms the backdrop to the play, and the purposelessness it leaves in its wake counterpoints Jess’s personal plight.
All this can feel tidy and conventional, as Ferrentino stages emotionally articulate confrontations between her characters, before co-opting Jess’s mother’s dementia to contrive an over-neat conclusion. But it remains involving, thanks to Fleetwood’s sardonic, unsentimental turn as the damaged heroine, determined that all this pain “cannot be for nothing”, and Ralf Little as the low-horizoned, big-hearted gas station attendant she left behind. The VR sequences are eyecatching, but Ugly Lies the Bone is stronger when fathoming that even more complex technology, the human heart.
- At the Lyttelton, London, until 6 June. Box office: 020-7452 3000.
