Stovepipe at the Bush Theatre

Stovepipe at the Bush Theatre

11 March, 2009
by: Joe Harrod

Usually, at the end of an interactive, theatre-in-the-round performance, the cast melts away and the audience are cast out blinking into the light or gloom of reality. At the finale of Adam Brace's extraordinary Stovepipe, the audience joins in a rousing hymn before the lights go down and the cast assemble at one end of the room to take the applause they so richly deserve. Reader, I hollered at them! It was an absolutely brilliant show.

I've been bewildered, swept away and bored rigid by interactive theatre in the past years. But, to borrow a phrase, 'everyone else was just playing'. This Iraq war story takes the immersive approach to theatre to new levels, marrying thrills and spills with narrative cohesion and an emotional impact that the oeuvre has previously lacked. I really cared about these people.

From surreal arms fairs to the deadly 'Route Irish' linking Basra to the airport, via hotel rooms, streets under curfew, churches, bars and the backrooms in which mercenary war is planned, a sizeable audience are swept back and forth on an exhilarating and knackering ride through the machinations of modern war. Sorry, modern peacekeeping – Stovepipe is the story of an ex-army Iraq vet, returning to the country with a Blackwater-type private security firm. It's a thriller in the conventional sense, with a manhunt for his missing friend at the core, and a wide view of the conflict and its wider impact.

Deftly staged in a draughty basement under the West12 shopping centre, near the Bush Theatre, Stovepipe freights the audience back and forth through a series of rooms, using minimal or sometimes lavish effects to create different scenarios. The promenade staging is intelligent and at times alarming. A particular highpoint is the natural conclusion of a bar scene – as the audience look their last on a flirtation between the hero and a journalist, they are suddenly  herded from the room by a bunch of drunken squaddies, waving beer bottles and shouting 'go on then, fuck off!' There are less dramatic fades but overall the pacing is perfect and a huge crowd easily catch each piece of action.

What sets this piece apart is the plotline. It's coherent, rather than relying on the audience to fill gaps or presenting a series of tableaux. The play introduces and follows a range of characters and there are no gaps to be filled – except those left deliberately ambiguous. Stovepipe is the most controlled interactive show yet. There are a few moments when this grip slips. Most notably, a sex sub-plot feels shoe-horned in and has a 'look away' quality. Overall though the manipulation is masterful, a 90-minute thrill ride that's exhausting, but doesn't allow your attention to wander.

Brace and the creative team behind this production wield an impressive emotional power, but perhaps the best element of this play is that while it is visceral, terrifying and emotionally jarring, the politics and morality are ambiguous. In the end, this is a tragedy, not a diatribe. The pragmatism of the ex-soldiers sets an emotional tone that makes Stovepipe more effective than it would be if it was peopled by 'good' and 'bad' characters.

In short, this is the best show I've seen for years, and makes the best use of the 'immersion theatre' medium yet. Go!

Photo credit: Bill Knight

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Joe Harrod