Tron Theatre Company are delighted to present their world premiere of Sea and Land and Sky by Abigail Docherty, winner of the Open.Stage Playwriting Competition 2010. Directed by the Tron’s Andy Arnold (Valhalla!, Cooking with Elvis) this ground-breaking piece of theatre follows journeys taken in war time– covering raw fear, dark humour and desperate love in a sensual tale that highlights the human elements of the Great War that are just relevant across the world today. Read more …
1916. Three young women from the Scottish Women’s Hospital are sent to the front line to support the war effort. Ailsa is working class and determined to make an impression on her superiors, Millicent is a self-confessed hedonist and Lily is searching for her lost husband. Unprepared for what they witness, each must find a way of coping as they fight to survive an experience that will change them forever...
Featuring a cast of top Scottish talent, including Carmen Pieracci, Mairi Philips, Laura McGonagle and BAFTA-winner Paul Riley, in his first return to the stage in over eight years - this historical play is a poetic and visionary account of war-time survival, based on actual diaries of young Scottish nurses who experienced the Great War.
This exciting new work from an up-and-coming young writer promises to enthrall you in a world of blackest humour and deepest emotion and leave you excited at this fresh new theatre experience.
No act of violence is watered down or hidden from the audience.
I don't think I've ever encountered a production with a direction and design so at odds with the tone of the script.
If anyone presumed the result of the Tron’s Herald-sponsored Open.Stage playwriting competition would be a sentimental sop for those who voted for it, think again.
If this was a war that changed our society forever, Docherty's play makes us feel its ultimate horror without ever getting a grip on the real direction of change, or its terrifying momentum.
Even with the unconvincing corpses of Andy Arnold's production, this is a vile and violent vision.
Filled with the gallows humour of the trenches, Docherty’s witty and profound new play is the first of a great career.
There are moments in Andy Arnold’s direction that lift the action beyond the immediate violence into an abstract absurdism.
Arnold’s production is a frighteningly realistic portrayal of the moral and mental disintegration of the nurses caring for the wounded at war, but it at times relies too heavily on its ability to shock the audience: after the characters find themselves in the chaos of a warzone in a promising first act, the play struggles to progress the narrative in the second act and instead descends into mild repetition.
Docherty’s writing has a keen sense of poetry, but it is more contemplative than dramatic, giving us individually pretty speeches that have little narrative momentum.
Sea and Land and Sky
Born to the theatre of war
Laura, Carmen forget River City to be nurses in the First World War
Angels of war
Tron Theatre, Glasgow from Thursday October 7, 2010, until Saturday October 23, 2010. More info: www.tron.co.uk
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