Timely tale with all the urgency of true life experience

Cockpit

Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh

The sign hanging in the foyer is roughly written in black paint on a tattered white sheet. “Under the control of the allied government,” it says; and in a moment, we are back in Germany in 1945, during the time of starvation and upheaval when the victorious allied powers first came together to provide a transitional government for defeated Germany, divided into four zones.

Cockpit, by screenwriter Bridget Boland, is a remarkable site-specific play written in 1947, and set in a grand 19th century theatre in a provincial German city which is being used by British troops as a temporary transit camp for refugees from across Europe. It’s a part the Lyceum was born to play: as we enter, there are little makeshift tents and sleeping places in the upper foyers, and on stage and all around the dishevelled auditorium we see director Wils Wilson’s young international company – with roots in Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, Albania, Greece, France and Sweden, as well as England and Scotland – wrapped in tattered coats and blankets, and engaged in the great, timeless refugee struggle to keep warm, to eat, to stay alive.

As the show starts, they raise their voices in the terrific, rough harmonies of east European choral music, a sound – brilliantly put together by actor/musical director Aly Macrae – of which it would be good to hear more, throughout the show, but Boland’s narrative is mainly a story of dis-harmony, and of the fierce unreconciled disputes between Poles and Russians, partisans and chetniks, French communists and collaborators, that constantly threaten to destroy the fragile control exercised by a young British officer and his battlehardened Geordie sergeant.

Boland’s long-neglected play is not really a great piece of drama; the characters are sketchy and often stereotyped, and the political thinking is pretty superficial, as Boland trumpets the idea that “belief