Parr the star of soldier’s tale

BRITANNIA WAVES THE RULES, Royal Exchange, Manchester, to June 7

AFTER an overlong, slightly-worthy trawl through the nether regions of Greece and Troy in “The Last Days of Troy”, this loose companion piece to the Exchange’s current main show (which continues in repertoire) is a snappier, rougher and readier look at the rigours of modern soldiery.

Manchester-raised playwright Gareth Farr’s 90-minute, interval-free 2011 Bruntwood Prize-winner is a mostly welcome shock to the system.

The premise is simple and not particularly profound: in a sequence that will never be sought by Blackpool tourism chiefs to use as an ad for the town, the jobless, dispossessed, drug-dealer-avoiding Carl (Dan Parr) hates the town, the tourists, the cold and the rain and takes the advice of the Army careers officer who promises he will see the world.

What he doesn’t realise is that “the world” in this case basically means all the bits of it whose citizens like to shoot at British squaddies, Afghanistan in particular.

Though he starts well, and his trips back home have the locals turning him into a bit of a hero, the pressure, the killing, the horror and the death of his friend Bilko pile on the PTSD (every war story these days seems to become a PTSD story eventually) and he returns home a sobered shell of his earlier, youthful enthusiasm for a life away from home.

It’s an inventive, packed, energised piece, of which the main component is the superb Parr, who inhabits the pent-up body of his character from the moment he walks on stage or is seen running on the beach (with the help of a bungee cord at his back to keep him on the spot).

Though the supporting characters — Francesca Zoutewelle as his would-be girl friend back home, Simon Harrison and Colin Tierney as the other male characters, and Clare Calbraith, who fleetingly plays his dead mother — are terrific, the stage and the show belong to Parr, never off stage and taking 90 per cent of the dialogue.

The tour-de-force performance is hampered over the last 20 minutes, in which the PTSD-induced ranting and rambling aren’t very convincingly or engagingly written. Though it’s reasonable to question how they could be.