Review: LAST OF THE BOYS, Southwark Playhouse, May 13 2016

Ben cracks open another Bud and sits outside his dilapidated mobile home, the last left in an abandoned park in Hicksville USA. Old friend Jeeter pitches up and berates him about not attending his father's funeral, but Ben, literally and metaphorically, just did not want to go there. They talk of 'Nam and don't need to say, "You had to be there, Man" because they both were. When Jeeter's new girlfriend turns up, with disapproving mother not far behind, the men's friendship begins to falter, as the shadow of the Vietnam war falls across all four damaged souls.

Steven Dietz's Last of the Boys (at Southwark Playhouse until 4 June) gets its European premiere some 12 years on from its Chicago debut, 12 years in which "Vietnam's" aftermath has retreated further into the shadows, but the USA's urge to bomb people half a globe away seems undiminished. The politics, and this is a political play, made me a little uneasy - we're asked yet again to fret over the damage done to the American psyche with barely a mention of the millions of Vietnamese slaughtered by napalm, Agent Orange and helicopter gunships (but we do hear the precise numbers of Americans in Vietnam at various stages of the war.) Even when Ben's reveries lead him to become US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the man who planned and then regretted the war, it's pretty clear that it's the American lives that matter, not the Vietnamese. Maybe that theme plays better in Chicago than it does in South London.

Director John Haidar moves his actors round Max Dorey's striking set well, and, to be fair, there is some amusing and occasionally cutting banter between Ben (a too young, but nicely intense, Demetri Goritsas) and Jeeter (Todd Boyce getting the half-crazy obsessional academic just about right). Zoe Tapper does what she can with sulky teen Salyer (though we're told that she's 35) and Wendy Nottingham makes the most of Lorraine, her mother, but both female roles are one-dimensional and disappointingly underwritten. Cavan Clarke gets to wear a nice uniform, but the young, innocent soldier taken, as Paul Hardcastle reminded us, at the age of 19, feels just too hackneyed a trope these days to have any real heft.

In the excellent programme, the director tells us that he asked regional theatres stateside for recommendations of plays that had yet to cross the Atlantic, and this play was the one he chose to stage. Maybe he should have picked another.