Despite some talented theatremakers behind it – including the Arcola's artistic director Mehmet Ergen and playwright David Greig – this double bill about drones feels a bit phoned in.
That's particularly true of the first play in the duo, 'This Tuesday', by war correspondent Christina Lamb and playwright Ron Hutchinson. It's 5am on a Tuesday, the day Barack Obama holds a weekly meeting determining who to target with drone strikes. One guy, on his way there, spent the night cheating on his wife. He's pro drones, the woman he’s just slept with is anti. Another man due to attend the meeting is a Pentagon Commander playing basketball with a young officer. The general is pro a strike on a particular terrorist, the young officer is anti. And finally a woman whose daughter has just been critically injured in a car crash is debating with a colleague whether she will make the meeting. She's for the strike, the colleague is against.
These uniformly polar dialogues play out like a badly written episode of 'Scandal', each character a mouthpiece for one side of an argument, none of them saying anything particularly interesting or insightful.
The second play, 'The Kid' by David Greig, fares much better. Four people are settling down for an evening of wine and nibbles in their cosy home near the drone base where two of them work. They've just carried out a successful strike and eliminated a target. These characters are more rounded, and elicit an excellent performance from Anne Adams as drone operator Shawna who is distant and withdrawn, unable to join in the evening’s pleasantries.
Greig sets up a powerful contrast between this comfortable domestic scene and the desolate, far away world they’ve only seen through a screen. These people, Greig shows us, can fight a war by day and go home to their loving family at night.
The plays raise a couple of thoughtful points, and reveal some depressing statistics, but they feel simultaneously slender and rushed, adding little to the debate on the future of warfare.