Review: Palace of the End (Arcola Theatre)

The Canadian playwright Judith Thompson’s 2007 triptych of monologues about the Iraq war (winner of Amnesty International’s Freedom of Expression Award in 2009) makes for an extraordinarily harrowing yet mesmerising theatrical experience in this new production by Jessica Swale.

Like the Palace of the End of the title (the former 'Palace of Flowers' transformed into Saddam Hussein’s torture chamber), these pieces are simultaneously beautiful and appalling.

There’s a female soldier based on Private Lynndie England, the suicidal weapons inspector Dr David Kelly and an Iraqi lady Nehrjas, one of the many victims of Saddam’s reign of torture. These three characters are linked by the fact that they are all damaged from having seen so much brutality and Thompson’s script explores the divergent ways in which they respond to it.

First up is Jade Williams as a heavily pregnant trailer park girl from West Virginia turned soldier, awaiting trial for sexually tormenting Iraqi soldiers, claiming that she didn’t made her victims do anything that she hadn’t at some point done herself. This is a young woman given responsibility that she is far too immature and poorly educated to handle- she's more concerned about her image on the internet and place in popular culture than the consequences of her actions. Yet she isn’t a complete monster as she has grown up in a culture of bullying and has never been taught any differently.

The case of Dr David Kelly, the weapons inspector who killed himself in 2003 over the British government’s dossier on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is a conspiracy theorist’s dream. Robin Soans portrays Kelly as a devoted and caring husband and father destroyed by the murder of his closest friends in Baghdad. The audience is placed in the awkward position of being asked to witness his death, as his family would try to revive him- you feel as if you should step in, but this is theatre. And it’s impossible to change what has already happened.

Thirdly, Imogen Smith delivers a highly dignified performance Nehrjas ('Daffodil' in Arabic), an elegant and well-educated widow in her fifties whose family was destroyed by Saddam Hussein’s secret police when they refused to divulge information of her husband’s whereabouts. Her unflinching descriptions of the torture that she and her sons endured juxtaposed with the anecdotes about day-to-day life in Baghdad before Saddam took over are narrated without losing control. It’s even more chilling that way.

Judith Thompson’s exquisite writing has a very welcome lightness of touch amidst the horror. Her attention to the little quirks that make characters human rather than archetypes is a delight. The poetic touches in the language never feel forced or overdone, but rather reflect the characters’ fragile state of mind as they slip further and further ‘Through the Looking Glass’ (a recurring motif). Jessica Swale’s direction is impeccably simple, letting the words speak for themselves.

All three monologues could be presented as stand-alone pieces, but as a trio, combined with three outstandingly sensitive performances, they make a remarkably powerful tour de force. While it deserves a larger audience than can be accommodated in the Arcola’s smallest studio, the intimacy is yet another one of the production’s greatest assets. The pieces may be miniatures in length, but there is nothing small about them. I haven’t seen anything quite so powerful this year. 


Written for musicOMH