★★★★★
444 words, 2 minutes read time.
Amid the background noises of feet walking up and down corridors and nearby doors banging, we meet Jack. He’s waiting for his brother-in-law to take him out for the weekend to his sister’s house. This is a regular routine. He goes to Edna’s one weekend, and Lottie’s the next. While waiting for Sam, he recalls how he ended up in this ‘dark and sticky place’. It is Nettley, the ‘looney bin’ for soldiers.
He’s been institutionalised for fifty-odd years. Bit-by-bit, he reveals more of his past. When he was fifteen, his mother told him about the murder of the heir to the Austrian throne. He also learned about the evil machinations of the Kaiser. According to his mum, he was a madman who had to be stopped. There would be a war soon.
Jack’s brothers enlisted in the Leicestershire Regiment. He wanted to do his bit for the King and the Empire. He also wanted to make his parents proud of him. He wasn’t a coward. He bridled at his parents’ insistence that he work out his engineering apprenticeship until he reached 19. So, he gave a false name, lied about his age, enlisted in the regiment and headed off to France.
At Ypres, ‘Wipers’, he met rain, rain and more rain, and mud. Tasked with delivering a message, he fell off the duckboard and became stuck in deep sucking mud. Then the incessant shelling began. He was unable to move as men died all around him.
Stephen Wale spent ten years researching this one-man play. He brings the story of his late uncle to life. Gradually, he unfolds the sheer horror of Jack’s transformation. Jack changes from an enthusiastic underage volunteer in search of adventure to a shambling wreck of a man. He becomes a demobilised soldier gone berserk from the horrors he’d seen. Jack has been shut away in a mental institution since 1922 after he was caught breaking shop windows.
Closed away in Nettley, he’d seen the rise of Mussolini and Hitler. He’d also saw news of another war and the emergence of rock’n’roll music.
This play offers a poignant, timely warning today. War fever is heightening. Politicians and newspapers are talking up war. They are putting ‘boots on the ground’ to stop another ‘mad Kaiser’ in Moscow, Beijing or Tehran. Those boots are filled with human beings. Jack reminds us that we ought not to forget the Fallen. We also need to remember the Damaged. These are the old soldiers who suffered enormous mental trauma. They were shamefully shut away, institutionalised and robbed of their pensions. Will we ever learn?
Reviewed by David Kerr
Till August 24th 2024. Tickets here
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