Review: TOY SOLDIER, Brockley Jack Theatre, 29 September 2016

In May 2004, the kids finally asleep, I tore the wrapper off my copy of the New Yorker, delivered every Friday, admired the always beautiful cover and scanned the listings for what's on in NYC, as usual wondering if I'd ever get to visit any of the theatres, bars and restaurants detailed. On turning the last page of the listings, I was confronted with the photos of the torture at Abu Ghraib prison, just outside Baghdad, and stared in disbelief.

With no Twitter back then and little, if any, reporting in the British press, it took me a moment to understand that the photos were real and not stills from an upcoming movie; that Seymour Hersh's cool prose was reportage and not fiction; most of all, that these were the good guys doing it. The report was jaw-dropping in its calm exposure of the depravity of people not brainwashed by religious zealots nor made desperate by a lifetime spent in a war zone, but people who were, for all intents and purposes, like me, my friends and my students. Sure, I knew that experiments had shown how "normal" human beings could be coerced easily into torture, but to see that abstraction given the visceral immediacy of those photographs, was a sledgehammer blow to one's comfort zone.

Much of Jonathon Crewe's Toy Soldier appears inspired by events at Abu Ghraib 12 years ago. There's the vague orders to get information from prisoners - and to be creative if it's not forthcoming. There's the insular culture that supports not just practices well outside the Geneva Convention, but strong ties (including love affairs) between those guarding and interrogating the prisoners, with the constant thought that one's own buddies' lives could be saved if you can find out that extra piece of information about an planned operation or active cell. Most of all, there is the pervasive sense that the military and political top brass both know about and support an "at all costs" approach to gaining intelligence and that it's the role of the poor bloody infantry to do the dirty work as they always have.

All perfectly acceptable as material (if a little ageing in relevance) for a taut court procedural that started life as a radio play and has been developed for the stage. But that transfer has not worked out happily. While Bianca Beckles-Rose is convincingly uptight and spikily defensive, all respectable white working-class and Estuary English, Crewe (in his role as director) has posh lawyers (Louisa Smith and Stanley Eldridge) striding about in a manner that owes much to American TV and nothing to English courts. And if their contempt for the law of evidence is intended to show how an Oxbridge education creates bonds stronger than any professional obligations, well it just looked wrong.

So too Bruce Kitchener as a judge who presided over more chaos in a court than I've ever seen and then proceeded to give a sentencing speech that could have been lifted straight from a "Stop The War" rally. Again, my objection here is not to the politics - it's good to see bold positions being take in fringe theatre - but to a character behaving as he would never do in real life, no matter what their personal convictions.

Though the play's specifics may feel a little outdated, the substance of its attack on those who blame the little guys, ill-trained, poorly led and given a nod and a wink to excuse transgressions made inevitable in asymmetric conflicts fought at a distance by proxies, is valid. The staging and characterisations are not.

Toy Soldier continues at the Brockley Jack Studio until 8 October.

Photo Ethan Taylor