To Crow’s Theatre on Sunday to see Natal’ya Vorozhbit’s Bad Roads; translated by Sasha Dugdale.  It’s play set during the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine.  It’s extremely skillfully and well constructed in six vignettes.  Collectively they explore aspects of the conflict; especially sexual violence and the dehumanising effects that war has on just about everybody caught up in it.

We start with a long monologue from a middle aged journalist who is researching a story on the defence of an airbase and the “heroic” commander of the defenders; a slightly younger man.  She develops a crush on him and tours the front lines with him.  We learn, subtly, that he doesn’t share the “western values” of the Kyiv based journalist.  He represents an older kind of Ukrainian nationalism that, inter alia, makes him irresistible to a certain kind of woman on social media.  The front line tour doesn’t dodge the squalor and sheer unpleasantness of life at the front and we find out, ironically, that the Commander is more or less incapable of sex most of the time; a theme that will return.

Cut to a reoccupied part of the Donbas where the relationship between the Russian speaking inhabitants and the Ukrainian “liberators” is ambiguous in the extreme.  Thirteen year old girls are trading small presents for sex with the soldiers and being treated by their contemporaries as if they are sleeping with the enemy.  “Ukrainian fucker” has become a term for slut shaming.  The girls’ headmaster is arrested at a checkpoint for not having his passport.  It’s touch and go whether he gets shot by the nervous young conscript.  After an interrogation about where his loyalties lie and nearly getting beaten up for pleading with the Ukrainian soldiers to stop sleeping with the girls he is released.  What struck me in this scene is not just the violence; sexual and otherwise, but the obvious despair of the people in the Donbas; pawns of both sides.

Cut to a snowy road where the Commander’s “front wife” (to use an old Red Army term); a medic, is evacuating his headless body in an ill maintained Jeep that breaks down on the highway.  The Russians have the head, as well as the Commander’s phone and are sending taunting text messages.  What transpires between the medic, her driver and the headless body that night before help arrives is, perhaps mercifully, only hinted at.  We do learn though that the medic is still troubled by the fact that before the war she ran over a chicken belonging to an old peasant couple.

Then comes the most brutal scene.  A completely psychotic separatist has captured a young female journalist.  His derangement encompasses both an inability to get sexual satisfaction except through acts of extreme sadism and a complete acceptance of the “Russian Nationalist” package; hatred of Jews and gays and Americans and worship of Putin coupled with some sort of vague, confused pan-Slavism.  It’s an extremely disturbing scene in which rape is one of the lesser horrors.

And then in the last scene; “before the war”, we encounter the future medic; a well dressed young woman with a smart car and an (almost) dead chicken.  Her guilt is ruthlessly exploited by the peasant couple in a reminder that the seeds of the cruelty of war are never far away.  What war turns people into is a function of where they start and their experiences but whether one starts as an essentially kind and thoughtful young woman or a Fascist psychopath, war will bring out the worst in a thoroughly dehumanising way.

There’s a great deal here that can’t be fully, directly portrayed (like beating someone’s skull in with a brick!) and the cast; all playing multiple roles, are brilliant at making it seem real and at making multiple characters work.  Andrew Chown plays the Russian psychopath (terrifying) and a soldier.  Katherine Gauthier is his (terrifying in a different way) victim and one of the teenagers.  Craig Lauzon is the Commander (with head still on) and a soldier at the checkpoint.  Veteran Diego Matamoros is brilliant as the Headmaster and the rather sinister male half of the peasant couple. Seana McKenna plays the grandmother of one of the girls and the chicken bereaved peasant woman.  Michelle Monteith is compelling in her long monologue as the journalist and convincing as the sluttiest of the teenagers.  Shauna Thompson brilliantly manages the reverse transformation from medic to chicken killer as well as playing one of the teenagers.  The range of skills on show here is impressive.  And it’s the Studio Theatre so we get to see it so close up you can read the serial number on a battle rifle.

Their excellence is reinforced by an extremely vivid lighting plot (Christian Horoszczak) and sound design (Thomas Ryder Payne) (both of which are startling, even frightening, at times).  Brilliant work too from Anita Nittoly; the Fight and Intimacy Director.  I’ve seen few shows where there is more physical and sexual violence and none where it’s more skilfully handled than here.  And, finally, director Andrew Kushnir pulls together a coherent narrative from what could easily be frustratingly episodic.

There’s much I’m impressed by here.  The realisation of the play is first class but it’s also the unsentimental way in which Vorozhbit explores what war does to people; especially in the complex situation of the Donbas in 2014.  Above all, she avoids a crudely Manichean characterisation of the conflict.  There are characters who represent what the west wants to think Ukraine is about, there are characters that hark back to an older and more troubling past and there are characters who encapsulate the despair of the rustbelt; ignored by the centre until it becomes something to fight for.  But for what, for who?

Bad Roads runs nearly two hours without a break.  It’s emotionally draining but terrific, thoughtful theatre.  It plays until November 26th at Crow’s Theatre.

Photo credits: Dahlia Katz (excellent as always but perhaps the selection doesn’t really convey the visceral nature of much of the action).