JUDGEMENT
Conway Hall

BARRY Collins’s play is a dark affair. In a monologue lasting just over an hour, Captain Vukhov of the Russian army recounts a harrowing wartime ordeal in which he and a handful of comrades are forced into cannibalism through dire necessity.
Locked up and left for dead in a Polish monastery during the German retreat, without food or water, the men are confronted with the gruesome logic of survival.
The inevitability of what then happens is skillfully handled by Collins’s script; and he doesn’t spare us the details.
Alongside the descriptions of dismembering human bodies and the eating of their flesh, Vukhov’s testimony gives us a sensitive commentary on the emotional ravages suffered by the men as they contemplate their actions and their grim future which awaits them.
The outline of the story is based on a real event from World War II.
History tells of two surviving officers who were found by the advancing Red Army, but in such an abject state that they were shot. Devouring their comrades had driven them insane and it was judged inappropriate for them, given their rank, to be seen by soldiers of whom they had previously been in command.
But in the script Captain Vukhov is a totally sane man, able to speak eloquently and movingly about his experiences. The story he narrates is not one of blood-curdling savagery in which men turn on each other like animals. It is much more sober, and perhaps a little disturbingly undramatic.
Vukhov’s one surviving comrade, however, has been left traumatised.
“We wanted to let the story speak for itself,” says director Delyth Jones. This minimalist production, with just one actor in a bare room, certainly does that. Mark Richard’s performance is impressively credible and understated. He admits that learning the lines for such a macabre story had initially left him ‘feeling sick’. So if you find the evening a little stomach-churning, spare a thought for the actor.

Until July 3
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