Theatre review: The Trench

Across the road from Southwark Playhouse there’s a full-sized billboard ad for the show that’s just opened in the Large proving that, if nothing else, Oliver Lansley’s The Trench has a larger-than-usual publicity budget for a fringe show. With detailed design, original songs (composed and performed by Alexander Wolfe, with the ensemble’s James Hastings also playing multiple instruments,) projections and extensive use of puppets, Les Enfants Terribles’ 2012 show, being seen in London for the first time in this revival, certainly wears its high production values on its sleeve; what else it’s really got to offer is a bit more doubtful. Lansley, who also co-directs (with James Seager) plays Bert, a First World War soldier whose former job as a miner makes him an obvious candidate to be a sapper – digging tunnels under no man’s land to bury mines near the enemy trenches. It’s a job with the inevitable added danger of getting caved in when a bomb goes off nearby, which is what happens to Bert and his new assistant Collins (Kadell Herida.)

Acknowledging a debt to Pan’s Labyrinth, The Trench frames Bert’s mental and physical journey back to the light as a fantasy quest, assigned to him by a cackling puppet creature operated and voiced by Edward Cartwright.

So Bert crawling out of the rubble becomes a perilous journey over a canyon, while his discovering a gas mask that saves his life becomes a riddle set by a second demon, whose skull turns into the mask once he defeats it. It’s a neat idea but Lansley’s approached the fantasy theme by setting the entire play in rhyming couplets, whose relentless de-dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum / de-dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum quickly grows old, as well as it being pretty clear that fitting everything into verse has been something of a struggle: There’s a lot of resorting to cliché (“the life grown from his seed,”) and archaic language (the occasional “thou” and “doth”) that doesn’t match the rest of the language but is clearly there to even out the scansion.

Lansley and Seager have thrown everything but the kitchen sink at bringing the slight story to life, and everything is technically very well-done, but I struggled to see what any of it really contributed – much of the play feels like they’re doing something to show you that they can do it, meaning that for all the emotional subject matter and plaintive singing the story left me cold. An example that summed this up for me: When Bert is going through the trenches holding out a lantern, we get an animated sequence projected onto the wall behind him, of the shadow of a hand holding a lantern. The fact that anyone would put the time, money and effort into animating a shadow, rather than lighting the scene to throw the actual shadow onto the wall disproportionately irritated me, and typified the “because we can” feel to the creative touches.

Although the performances are using the actors’ physicality well, there’s a tweeness to it all – it was only a couple of minutes in that I thought of Legz Akimbo Theatre Company, and once that thought’s there it’s hard to shake. Cartwright’s vocal portrayal of the main creature is also a clichéd gruff voice with “heh heh hehs” interspersing every other line. There’s points where The Trench borders on the unintentionally funny but doesn’t even quite reach that; it’s a melodrama that piles misery upon misery on its protagonist without really managing an emotional connection out of it all, and with the regular musical breaks Ian described it as an hour-long Elbow video. Individually so much of this is expertly done; put together it doesn’t rescue the script, or add up to anything that meant much to me.

The Trench by Oliver Lansley is booking until the 17th of November at Southwark Playhouse’s Large Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Rah Petherbridge.

NB: There’s extensive use of strobe lighting (so extensive I had to just close my eyes for large portions of the play.)