The title is a riff on Dante’s Inferno however there aren’t sufficient circles in hell for the horror contained in Invoice Cain’s upsetting play. The names have been modified however that is basically a feverish re-examination of the life, trial and demise of US soldier Steven Dale Inexperienced, who was convicted in 2009 for killing an Iraqi household and raping the 14-year-old daughter. It’s a very powerful watch – not with out advantage however tough to sit down via and with some critical flaws in its composition.
There’s a heated depth to Man Masterson’s tightly calibrated manufacturing,held collectively by Jack Arnold’s buzzing battlecry of a soundscape which slowly engulfs us because the trial approaches. Duncan Henderson’s neatly symbolic set frames the motion inside a pair of glowing pink circles: from the fury of Baghdad to the loneliness of the holding cell, that is the story of a soldier’s life that has all the time, on some degree, felt like a type of imprisonment.
Because the soldier, Daniel E Reeves, meets with attorneys and legal professionals, a severely creepy pastor and shockingly incompetent military psychiatrists (all performed with an eerie sense of disassociation by Samara Neely-Cohen, Daniel Bowerbank and David Calvitto), we begin to suspect they may all be a product of Reeves’s deeply disturbed psyche. This fuzzy maintain on actuality makes for a strong ambiance however a complicated play. Cain appears to be making an argument in regards to the hypocrisy of battle and the culpability of these in authority but it surely’s laborious to know which bits to take severely in a play that’s neither truth nor fiction.
Joshua Collins is horribly watchable because the imprisoned Reeves. To easily spend time with this soldier is to start to humanise him. There’s one thing in regards to the physicality of Collins – who salutes and workouts with robotic precision – that factors to how little management a recruit has over his personal physique. However for all Collins’ charisma, there’s one thing that doesn’t sit proper about telling this story via the soldier’s eyes, and giving so little time to the homicide victims.
On the Park theatre, London, till 23 July. Then at Meeting George Sq., Edinburgh fringe, 3–29 August.
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