Theatre

The most curious aspect of Ron Hutchinson’s newish play is that he treats the discovery that tabloids and the truth don’t often sally forth in company as some kind of dramatic revelation. It revisits the Daily Mirror’s 2004 publication of faked photos of British soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners. Here, another, unnamed red-top is approached by an army veteran, retired from every kind of service after stepping on a mine, who has a compromising photo on his mobile phone that a pair of scrabbling, hungry hacks will do anything to get their hands on. That includes a photoshoot of the veteran’s scouse wife, topless, which will require hours of airbrushing to transform into something titillating. The plot revolves around whether the photographs, fake or not, reveal a devastating truth, which the army and the tabloid are both desperate to uncover.

But this delicate, elusive idea is all but chased from view by the two dimensional caricatures Hutchinson employs to discuss it. Director Caroline Hunt doesn’t help matters with a largely turgid production, in which the photos are blandly projected onto ugly, grey corrugated iron. Sylvestra Le Touzel does a winning turn as the iron-clad army lawyer, and Alistair Wilkinson is increasingly affecting as the broken, unempathetic soldier with no one left to fight. But their flashes of brilliance, and the script’s consistently clever manipulation of the facts on offer, aren’t nearly enough to lend this brash, unconvincing fiction its own, inherent ring of truth.