GCTC’s This is War is bleak, troubling and resonant
Photograph by: Chris Mikula , The Ottawa Citizen
This is War
Great Canadian Theatre Company/Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre
Reviewed Thursday, Jan. 6 by Patrick Langston for the Ottawa Citizen
Why do I do anything?” asks Tanya Young, one of the characters in Hannah Moscovitch’s bleak and troubling This is War. “To distract myself for two minutes,” she answers herself, the words —like a line from a Samuel Beckett play — telescoping the futility, the confusion, the emotional disconnection that is her situation: that of a Canadian soldier in the volatile region of Panjwaii, Afghanistan circa 2008.
Master Corporal Young (Sarah Finn) is one of a Canadian Forces quartet stationed there. Also present is the young, wide-eyed recruit from Red Deer, Alt. Jonny Henderson (Drew Moore). He’s got a thing for Tanya.
The other two are Stephen Hughes (John Ng), a sergeant who’s been around the block more than once but seems as ill-equipped emotionally to command others as he is to command himself, and Chris Anders (Brad Long), a medic whose brusque exterior conceals a caring man.
In an interpretation of the play by GCTC that is for the most part powerfully resonant, the four reveal themselves, their relationships, and the joint operations incident that’s at the heart of the story in a manner that’s somewhere between dream, reality and memory.
At times they face us, the audience, as they tell, one by one, an unseen journalist what happened in Afghanistan. At other times, they enact occurrences. Events are sometimes re-run two or three times with small changes in costume (Brian Smith’s drab, dusty uniforms are as deliberately disheartening as his featureless desert set) so that we see the event from the perspective of each soldier involved………