Bad Roads, Royal Court Theatre review ★★★★★

Ukraine's foremost playwright Natal'ya Vorozhbit explores women's experience of warfare as part of a new season that brings five world premieres and five international writers to the Royal Court. Bad Roads, translated into English by Sasha Dugdale, combines different accounts to give a set of snapshots from wartime Ukraine. With Vorozhbit’s caustic writing, and with Royal Court Artistic Director Vicky Featherstone at the helm, the play charts the distressing and overwhelming wounds of war. The stories are told separately, but their contents and even their characters bleed into each other demonstrating the sweeping effects of the theatre of war.

There’s a hint of absurdism in Vorozhbit’s script that is coupled with desolate, and often strikingly violent encounters. Featherstone accentuates the barren atmosphere by disregarding straightforward and naturalistic staging. Trees trunks clutter the stage, and a conversation in a car is not limited by the spatial confines of a car at all. Sometimes a bathtub or a freezer, objects placed between the trees, become focal points for the action. The terrain feels uncharted, unkept. It makes for an engaging if not sometimes uncertain atmosphere.

Each snapshot deals with a different relationship impacted by war. Some of these stories are romantic, and Vorozhbit’s writing is at its best when combining the typical, even banal, parts of the everyday with the brutality of war. Individual scenes move towards their own climax, but sadly there isn’t an ultimate narrative arch that propels the piece. At times it’s therefore slow-moving. What might be considered the epilogue is perhaps the most intriguing, the most comedic, and the most unnerving of the scenes.

The best moments are accentuated with the use of light and music, and Featherstone shows us that terror does not have to be seen to be felt. Frustratingly, none of the characters have names, but Mike Noble and Anne Lacey shine in their roles. The rest of the ensemble are also strong, each with a different regional accent, which further accentuates the limitless effects of war.

Bleak, harrowing, and sometimes bitterly funny, Bad Roads is a stark and piercing examination of the effect of war on women.

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