Our Ajax, Southwark Playhouse, London – review

Opening just before Remembrance Day in the UK, this new play from Timberlake Wertenbaker is a painful reminder that the price of war can be catastrophic damage to minds as well as bodies. Wertenbaker draws on Sophocles’ ancient tragedy Ajax but also on conversations with armed personnel, and takes a free hand with the original, transposing the action to a modern combat zone (probably Afghanistan) and fitting her soldiers with pungent dialogue to suit. It is a frank and compassionate study of psychological and emotional extremis, but it also proves a rather awkward marriage of styles.

Here Ajax, the military hero who runs mad, is a revered colonel suffering from combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder and tipped over the edge when, after years of arduous conflict, he sees Odysseus promoted over him. He arrives, in Joe Dixon’s riveting, volatile and unsettling performance, covered in gore and dragging the bloody corpse of a goat across the sand-strewn stage. Ajax has killed the animal in a wild frenzy, believing it to be Odysseus, after the goddess Athena scrambled his brain. But his slaughter of the local villagers’ herd is still shocking: his loyal men attempt to hide his crime from the furious general (here played as a pompous American by John Schwab) and debate what to do with their disturbingly unstable leader.

Wertenbaker blends the immediate with the universal: “How much longer?” cries one desperate soldier, embracing Troy, Basra, Flanders, Vietnam, Bosnia and Helmand in his litany of hellholes for the combatants involved. The antiquity of the source play and its formality of style intensify the sense of conflict as a continuing human sore. But it also makes for awkwardness: the presence of Athena (beautiful and capricious in Gemma Chan’s performance) doesn’t really work, and her scenes with Adam Riches’ oddly unremarkable Odysseus jolt you away from the human drama and slow the pace.

Both the play and David Mercatali’s taut production are most powerful when they focus on the distress of the soldiers as they attempt to deal with their much-loved, wild-eyed leader and reveal their own frailties, fears and flashbacks. There’s a lovely performance from Frances Ashman as Ajax’s lover Tecmessa and fine work from James Kermack, Jordan Mifsud, Fiona Skinner and Oliver Devoti as the soldiers. At its best, this is a sobering, stark and powerful evening, but, like the soldiers it portrays, it struggles with split loyalties.

southwarkplayhouse.co.uk