When the RSC invited Brad Birch to write a play about Britain, his first impulse was to travel 8,000 miles, to the Falkland Islands. His uncle had served in the conflict over the colony and, 40 years on, Birch wondered about the islanders’ experience – forgotten people who for 74 days were the centre of the world’s attention.
Aldo Vázquez’s design has a model village charm –miniature versions of the distinctive clapboard houses on a felty floor of moss and khaki. It’s like an English rural town – though its climate is forbidding, its roads lumpy (“imagine a carpet made out of porridge”) and breakfast is scrambled penguin eggs.
Everything changes when Argentine troops fetch up on South Georgia. Occupation and liberation prove equally disorienting – the cast blink out with apprehensive eyes and shuffle little houses about the stage: their settled lives have been unmoored.
This is, someone notes, “a history play”, and like Shakespeare’s own histories could use an edit. Busy but stale interludes show British press and politicians exploiting the invasion, all harrumphing platitudes. Birch’s mode is narration – the islanders want to explain how it felt at the unwelcome eye of this storm, but being narrated at becomes tiring. Aaron Parsons’ strongly cast production initially has a vivid physical life, but seems worn down by enervating conflict, until people sink despondently to the floor.
Community is a prized, insular value that increasingly comes under pressure. There’s a tight-knit, small-minded undertow from the beginning – “gossip, done right, is a form of exercise”, chirps Joanne Howarth’s droll neighbour. An Argentine researcher (woebegone Eduardo Arcelus) is gradually ostracised. Resolve begins to fray, hard truths are told or swerved.
Has Birch written a play about Britain? It’s one about the tangled stories we tell ourselves. “We’re British because Britain owes us,” declares Sandy Foster’s forthright medic. What looks like triumph from Downing Street is less clear on the lumpy ground. Argentine soldiers can aid or intimidate; British squaddies are “not exactly the Dirk Bogardes one might have imagined.” Home is British and Argentine, both here and far away: “you have to get used to carrying two feelings at once.”
