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'Smallwar'
Jeremy Abrahams'Smallwar'

SmallWar review

Traverse Theatre

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Hovering on your last thread of consciousness, on the boundary between life and death must be a remarkable experience. Certainly that’s how it appears in Valentijn Dhaenens’s ‘SmallWar’, which serves as both the follow up to and polar opposite of his bombastic 2011 show, ‘BigMouth’. 

Timed to mark the hundredth anniversary of the First World War, the piece draws on the testimony of those who worked with the dead, the dying and the shellshocked in that conflict and others to weave a woozy, crepuscular and dread-filled piece of experimental theatre. The only live actor on stage is a dragged up Dhaenens, in the narratorial role of a WWI nurse. 

In fact Dhaenens is the only actor on stage in any form: playing prerecorded on a video screen and a gauze wall, he also plays a dying soldier, who sheds multiple projections of himself that react with confusion to their situation; who spasm and swear under the weight of PTSS; who answer a naggingly old phone to enter into slow, dislocated conversations with family members.

It is a highly original show, totally stripped of narrative or the sort of heartstring tugging and emotional manipulation that so often come with work on this subject. There are snippets of historic accounts, little factoids, but really what it’s evoking is a sort of ghastly liminal space between the tail end of life and oblivion.

The downside of this all is that it’s often really quite dull, the intentionally low energy levels, low light levels and glacial pacing all slightly sapping your will to live. But it has to be said, Dhaenens entirely achieves what he set out to do. And at the end, when a list of the obscure first hand testimonies he drew upon to create the show roll across the screen, we’re allowed the teary moment previously denied to us. 

By Andrzej Lukowski

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