Powerful take on Afghan war

The Two Worlds of Charlie F

Opera House, Manchester

UNLIKE the invented, intense and ultimately slightly cliche-driven “Britannia Waves the Rules” over at the Royal Exchange recently, this Afghan war play is very much the real thing — simple, direct and powerful.

Based on the stories of genuine soldiers and indeed featuring some of them alongside the able-bodied actors, this undramatic drama unpeels some of the matter-of-fact horrors of war, such as the effects of an IED on the body — using a marker pen on one recruit to show what gets lacerated, what gets broken and what gets blown off. It’s quite a list.

The Charlie F in question is an ordinary squaddie — a Canadian — who signed up for the usual mix of adventure and patriotism. His two worlds are those of Army and civilian life, the latter endured with the physical and emotional problems that come with losing a leg — and actor Cassidy Little has a gap where his right leg used to be to prove it. Acting doesn’t come much more Method, as you can see from the lost limbs of some of the other performers.

As the soldiers reveal, war changes you, whether it is the bullet or explosion that harms you physically, or the pressure and fear that provoke emotional and worse reactions; the inexplicable resentment of the care from a loved one that was craved while out in the desert, for example.

Two Worlds is not, in one sense, a play; more a succession of scenes delineating the soldiers who lost something away at the front; a progression from recruitment to being back home for good, one of the “freak show”, as Charlie calls it, of injured soldiers undergoing rehabilitation.

The whole thing is simply done, though I could honestly do without the occasional songs and dancing, but at least they remind us that Charlie F is an entertainment, not an Army information film and not, remarkably, an angst-driven evening of how bad it is to be a soldier in a country where everyone hates you...

Frankly, it’s pretty amazing stuff: pain, anguish and fear sitting comfortably alongside the humour-driven relationships of the soldiers themselves.

The show invariably gets a standing ovation and for sheer down-to-earthedness, if that’s a word, it deserves every bit if it.