Bás (Shallow Death)

…Cockpit Theatre, Marylebone

Some powerful performances but an empty play. Judge for yourself at Church of St Luke (The Bombed Out Church), Berry Street, Liverpool from 2nd to 6th September or at The Crypt, St Andrew Holborn Church, 5 St Andrew Street, London EC4A 3AB from 22nd to 27th September.

I think all five cast members have only recently become fully-fledged thespians. Their talent and enterprise is worth encouraging as they try to make headway in a precarious profession.

So why did this production fail? Probably because too few creative minds and skills were involved. The two actors who played the lead roles also wrote the play. They may have directed it, too, and designed the set and chosen the costumes and taken on other tasks. The only non-acting theatrical roles credited in the programme are a stage manager, a technical manager and a stage hand.

‘It is World War One. A Welsh minister and a young Irish guard become trapped in a collapsed dug-out after a German night raid, leaving the rest of their regiment trapped outside.

They must find a common language in order to communicate. By referencing their bibles they manage to construct a bastardised form of Irish and Welsh, but the gravity of their plight becomes far greater than they had envisaged. Bás is a word which means "Shallow" in Welsh and "Death" in Irish.

The play explores the idea that these men, and often boys, were never heroes, but victims, sent to face an inevitable death, which was never theirs to die.’
Schizothemia Theatre Company.

This idea has been well explored; the play offered no new insights. World War One trenches have become familiar; this play offered no new ways of looking at them. The Irish/Welsh device was original but implausible.

I had hoped a play like this would give me new perspectives or strengthen my existing perspectives, tell me something I didn’t already know or something I did know in a fresh way. Maybe a Tommy and a Hun stranded and dying in no-man’s land or a Tommy and a French farmer trapped and dying in a barn or a German officer and German private dying in a German trench would have worked. I don’t know what would have produced a play and production worth seeing. But I’m fairly sure that more creative and critical input would have helped.