Passion but no politics in this war story

Bad Roads

It’s five years since thousands of Ukrainians flocked to Independence Square (Maidan Nezalezhnosti) in Kiev to protest against their government’s refusal to proceed with developing ties to the EU. Those events, which came to a head in February 2014, led to more than 1.7million people being displaced and an estimated 10,000 casualties.

Born in 1975 and described as the “leading Ukrainian playwright of her generation”, Natal’ya Vorozhbit first came to attention here in 2009 with The Grain Store at the RSC, a powerful evocation of Stalin’s 1932-33 terrorfamine. The Royal Court put on staged readings of Maidan: Voices from the Uprising, her verbatim piece derived from interviews with protesters, in April 2014. Now she has responded to the situation in the country’s benighted eastern war-zone.

The accent is on female experience. Actress Kate Dickie lets us in on the furtive, obsessive yearning a woman scriptwriter develops for the handsome soldier (married) who helps her. When they kiss, she goes weak at the knees, as if in a film, with the war a romantic back-drop.

What follows in Bad Roads pursues a similarly bumpy track. War plays havoc with the law of desire. A paramedic driving the headless corpse of her soldier lover back to be reunited with the dead man’s wife drunkenly makes an aggressive pass at her soldier passenger when their vehicle breaks down in the freezing cold, before grappling with the body-bag: “He’s mine. I’ll do what I want with him”.

A head-teacher stopped at an army checkpoint is threatened with rough treatment but challenges his Ukrainian interlocutors about their sexual exploitation of one of his teenage charges. Later, a young woman manages to coax from her sadistic-psychotic separatist captor the semblance of common humanity.

What follows is a surreal exchange in which a woman, weeping for the chicken she has run over, tries to recompense its owners, only for them to become ever more ludicrously mercenary. Vicky Featherstone directs. I have no complaints about what we see; the cast are superb.

What’s missing is a broad sense of the political battleground, the scenes behind closed doors affecting lives on the ground. Ukraine can’t just be a passing curiosity in an upstairs theatre space. Too much is at stake for that.