The Living Unknown Soldier

Published Monday 18 February 2008 at 10:45 by Natasha Tripney

Memory, and its malleability, is the subject of Simple 8’s intriguing devised production based on Jean Yves Le Naour’s Le Soldat Inconnu Vivant.

It is 1918, the end of the First World War, and a soldier is brought in to an institution suffering from amnesia. He does not know his name, who his family were or who he was fighting for. The doctor who takes him in makes it his mission to discover the man’s identity, but his efforts to do so just draws out the desperate, the people still searching for lost loved ones, eager to make this blank of a man into their missing husband, their missing son.

At the heart of this production is a fascinating narrative and the fact that the soldier is played in turns by all the members of the company is inspired, emphasising his absence as a character, the void created by his amnesia. Tony Guilfoyle is engaging as the doctor, who becomes obsessed with finding the soldier’s family, but his role is somewhat underdeveloped, and his naturalistic performance is at odds with some of the heavy-handed theatrics that director Sebastian Armesto employs elsewhere in the production. Not all the devised elements knit together as they should and this impacts negatively on the play’s potential power to move and excite.