War wounds

Sapper Lyndon Chatting-Walters was just 18 when he was thrown 60ft from his vehicle by a Taliban bomb in Afghanistan, breaking his back in four places. Some three years later, he was performing on a West End stage.

On paper, these events couldn’t be further removed, but the show that put him on stage aimed to connect the two, bringing the stark reality of soldiers wounded in Afghanistan to audiences back home.

The Two Worlds of Charlie F, which now plays at the Fringe, originated from an idea by Alice Driver, producer at Masterclass, a theatrical charity established by London’s Theatre Royal Haymarket. Experienced at using theatre as a tool to boost skills and confidence, Driver was inspired to use this model to help the recovery of wounded service personnel following a visit to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. “I was never really aware of how young these individuals were and what type of injuries they were going through,” she says. “Due to the advances of medicine, on the positive side, loads more people are surviving. But on the other hand the injuries they’ve got are far greater than have ever been experienced before. I chatted to one guy who said when you become injured you become very vulnerable and you lose your sense of self. I just thought, well let’s use this theatre model as a way of aiding recovery.”

She set in motion a project that was to culminate in two performances at London’s Theatre Royal Haymarket in January of a play not only based on the experiences of wounded soldiers but starring them as well.

The MOD had never previously used theatre to aid recovery, and convincing them wasn’t easy, says Driver. Having the support of the Royal British Legion and theatrical legend Trevor Nunn helped, as did the assurance that this was no amateur, community project but a professional production. Tactics were required, too, in order to recruit service personnel to take part in something the majority had no experience of. So Driver brought along hardman actor Ray Winstone to show the ‘cool’ side of theatre, a ploy that resulted in 30 soldiers—both men and women—volunteering for Bravo 22 Company, as the new theatre company would be called.

It was the task of playwright Owen Sheers—author of last year’s The Passion in Port Talbot—to interview those soldiers and work their stories into a play that would “remain authentic to their voice and their experience,” he says, “but also to have a very unflinching gaze at what those three letters [war] mean.”

For some, including Chatting-Walters, it was the first time they had shared their experiences with anyone outside the military. “He [Sheers] made me feel so comfortable and I completely opened up to him,” he says. “A lot of people ask you about it but you don’t feel as if they actually care. With Owen, he was so calm about everything, and he genuinely looked interested, he wanted to know.”

Rehearsals were certainly interesting. “Medication became our biggest obstacle,” says Sheers with a wry laugh, citing those who would fall asleep due to the meds, or have short term memory issues. Chatting-Walters was in “a lot of pain” for most rehearsals. But all that found its way into the play, as did physical limitations, which, Sheers said, weren’t limitations at all but “expansive”. A double amputee’s experience of physiotherapy became one of the show’s most powerful images.

Sheers and Driver agree that the process of developing the play was as important as the performance. Indeed, for Chatting-Walters, who was initially attracted to the project for the chance of a free trip to London, rehearsals “worked wonders” for his mental recovery. “It was just brilliant for all of us. We were all back as a unit again, which we hadn’t been since we left [Afghanistan]. It was good to talk about stuff that we hadn’t spoken about before.”

“In many cases it’s life changing,” adds Driver. “People who are suffering from depression have been lifted out of that. Others have used this as a springboard of confidence to go and do what they really want to do.”

At the heart of the project was recovery, but Sheers stresses how important it became to have those stories told to audiences distant from the reality of war. “There was a very strong sense amongst the cast that they were doing this for all the other people, not just soldiers but civilians,” he says. “Those that have been wounded in conflict have an absolute right to have their voices heard and it’s one of the most powerful peace movements I can think of.”

It’s a sentiment shared by Catherine Shipton, star of one-woman play Soldiers’ Wives. Adapted from a piece written for BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour by playwright Sarah Daniels, Soldiers’ Wives sees Shipton—known for many years as Duffy in Casualty—play five army wives on an English base, whose lives are deeply affected when one of their husbands suffers a devastating injury.

“It’s an area of our society we don’t want to look at,” says Shipton. “It’s like Jack Nicholson says in A Few Good Men, ‘you can’t handle the truth!’ I’m an anti-war person politically, but the humanity of these women’s stories... it’s a fact of life and therefore I want to expose their story.”

The nub of the piece, says Shipton, is the psychological wounds inflicted on those women, which can be just as traumatic as the experiences of their husbands. “The issue for the women left behind is they just never know,” says director Anthony Biggs, who could draw on his own experience of being from a military family. “Every day is a mixture of boredom and also terrible fear that you might get that call to be told some terrible news.”

The production had a week’s try-out in the spring at London’s Jermyn Street Theatre—strangely, just a minute’s walk from the Theatre Royal Haymarket—and, like ...Charlie F, the overriding feeling was that this was a necessary play. “We were a little bit nervous that the piece might not reflect the army in a positive light,” says Biggs. “We didn’t want it to be negative, but we wanted it to be real. Actually all the people who came who had military backgrounds all went ‘spot on.’ For once the story is told.”

Both productions have ambitions to reach a wider audience. ...Charlie F will be back in the West End after Edinburgh and Sheers and Driver are in discussions with the Royal British Legion about turning the play into an annual rehabilitation course. Meanwhile Shipton and Biggs would like to take Soldiers’ Wives on tour.

And both are testament to theatre’s ability to educate, inform and ultimately help. “What’s so great,” says Driver, “is I never said this project would do all this good stuff, but the people who are turning around and saying ‘wow this has changed my life’ are the service personnel and that’s what makes it amazing.”