Triptych (Galeri, Caernarfon)

Gwyn Emberton and Albert Garcia in Triptych III

Most of us cannot imagine what it's truly like to serve in a war zone. All the role-playing video games and CGI-bolstered Hollywood blockbusters in the world cannot truly recreate what it must be like to actually be there, in the thick of it, day in, day out, with no way out and no real desire to find one. There is no Stop or Off button for the soldiers who serve Queen and country on our behalf. There is only the honour, and the horror.

Triptych is the brainchild of De Oscuro producer Judith Roberts, who has been working with ex-service personnel and their families for almost 18 months to get a better idea of what it feels like to be in conflict situations such as Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan or the Falklands. We have a good idea what it looks like to be there, but the actual emotional impact it has on the soldier, the mental legacy they are left with upon demob, can be elusive, often because veterans cannot or will not discuss their thoughts.

Roberts has done a remarkable job of trying to root out a clear picture of the emotional torment, horror and trauma of what our servicemen and women are left with after the bullets stop flying. Triptych I is a video installation filmed and edited by Roberts which serves as the perfect introduction to the themes of the production as a whole. You enter a room containing four video walls playing the harrowing testimonies of ex-service personnel, their mothers, wives and partners. The four videos play concurrently, the soundtrack from each weaving in and out of those from neighbouring videos. You need to stand close to the speakers for a particular video to hear the voices, but while there is a tendency to want to move around and watch all four videos, in truth you only really need see one.

The testimonies are brutally frank and sometimes difficult to watch. Grown men teeter on the verge of tears while their wives and partners tell of the emotional turmoil their families go through when the psychological damage soldiers suffer comes home. One wife tells a shocking and unsettling tale of when her husband began behaving very erratically one evening, punching holes in doors, filling the washing machine with all manner of household items to get rid of the "filth", and lying on top of his wife for hours to "protect" her from the encroaching enemy. It was all in his mind, but for his terrified wife, it was all too real, and there was very little help forthcoming from the authorities.

Each person's testimony was sobering stuff: an army medic told of having to collect the charred remains of burnt bodies following the explosion of an IED, and put body parts into body bags. Such an image is indelible, immovable from their memories and conscience. Such horrors cannot be reproduced in a video game or movie, because we're not actually there. These men and women were, and they bear the emotional scars, their personalities forever tainted.

And so you leave Triptych I with the emotional baseline required for the next installment. It's the best way to ready yourself for the drama ahead. Going into Triptych II unprepared, perhaps with chit-chat about the day's events on your lips, is counter-productive and also feels disrespectful to the subject matter. The videos are an essential part of the overall experience.

Triptych II is a drama featuring eight actors, a sparse but creatively flexible set and some back-projection. Written by Judith Roberts and Gwyneth Glyn, it is apparently inspired by the tragedies of ancient Greece, although I'm not sure that reference is all that high in the mix. The 90-minute play tells the story of a Merthyr family fractured by conflict, by PTSD and by guilt. Rhys Parry Jones is the overbearing patriarch whose experiences in the Army have left him a slave to methodical behaviour, his life a constant military routine, even when ironing a shirt or setting a dinner table. He is a ball of seething anger and frustration, an intimidating presence on the stage - you feel he can explode at any moment if somebody says or does the wrong thing, however slight. He's scary for the audience to watch, so imagine what it's like living with him...

His wife Mair is played brilliantly by Rebecca Harries, who gets across the bone-shaking inner fear of having such an unstable explosive in the home so convincingly. Mair is the character we all relate to, and feel for, and fear for. She is walking on eggshells at all times, and the scene where she loses her turquoise necklace and has to go through a series of regimented, repeated investigations at the behest of her quietly seething husband is powerful stuff.

The rest of the cast are equally as effective: Ceri Murphy plays their "media wanker" son who can't help making a move on his late brother's former flame, but who, from her, makes a discovery that rocks the entire family. There is a natural charisma to Murphy so right for the character.

Gareth ap Watkins plays serviceman Rhys, whose home life has been destroyed by what has happened to him in the field - he confesses he sometimes looks at his two daughters and feels nothing. He is a fractured man, his mental stability is spilt, and the saddest thing is he knows something is wrong, but the only way he can think of to stop it is through self-sacrifice. The revelation at the heart of the play - that Rhys deliberately allows himself to be blown up by an IED so that his family can have what he believes is a better life without him - is a powerful one. There is a scene set in Heaven with Rhys speaking to other soldiers killed in action, who express their displeasure at him willingly giving up his life. They want their lives and families back, and it brings home the magnitude of what Rhys has done - was his self-sacrifice selfish, or an unavoidable symptom of his mental condition?

There are aspects of the play that don't work. It is not advertised as being a bilingual production, but a good third of the dialogue is in Welsh. While not being a Welsh speaker myself, I could still follow the gist of what was being said through context and the on-off attempts at translation. But I don't see the point of having the play bilingual - why not choose one language or the other, not both? I asked one Welsh speaker if they got anything out of the fact it was bilingual. They didn't, and neither did they see the point of it. For a non-Welsh speaker, the scattergun use of Welsh is disorientating, and serves only to remove you from the drama. For a Welsh speaker, it's common to follow bilingual dialogue, but when there is no dramatic or creative point to it other than to be different, I question the need.

Also, while some of the Welsh was translated into English through projections on a rear screen, that screen was often partly obscured by the set, so was not as effective as it might have been. I realise the play is set in Wales, but I'd urge De Oscuro to ditch the bilingual approach and just stick with one or the other. The stylised moving around of the set walls and cages also makes the play longer than it needs to be.

There is a 30-minute gap between the play and the third installment, and half an hour is probably too long. After an uninterrupted 90 minutes of harrowing emotional drama, you do need a break - if only to stretch your legs and get some fresh air - but it would be better at 15-20 minutes, the length of a regular interval. That's enough time away from the intensity of the theme to process and discuss what you've seen. What you don't want is so long that you actually start drifting back out of the mindset you're in, with time to think about tomorrow's meal or what to buy little Johnny for his birthday.

Triptych III is a 20-minute dance piece choreographed by Gwyn Emberton, and performed by him and dancer Albert Garcia. It begins with Gwyn handing out boiled sweets to the audience. I ruminated for a time over what this symbolised: some people saw it as the soldier giving something out for free (ie, his career, his time, his sanity, ultimately his life), but rarely getting anything back (some people innocently popped the sweet into their mouth for the duration of the performance). Gwyn told me that one ex-serviceman saw it as a piece of his soul being handed back to him. What the handing out of sweets really means is individual to the audience member, and although I concur with other people's ideas, one thing's for sure: I couldn't bring myself to eat the sweet given me. I would somehow feel guilty, wantonly devouring something so trivial given to me so pointedly by someone representing our military heroes. Or maybe I just don't like the flavour I was given.

The dance piece embodies the inner torment of being a soldier. At times Gwyn and Albert are comrades, protecting one another in combat. They have one another's backs (sometimes literally), they support one another, they cradle their comrade's heads. There is tenderness, but then there's also anger and much frustration. At other times the dancers are opposed, throwing one another around, undercutting one another, pushing and yanking, like warring enemies. And at other times, one dancer becomes the landscape over which the other travels - the body becomes a trench or a crawlspace, one dancer writhing and climbing around the other, like a soldier in the field.

It is the depiction of the emotional torment sufferers of PTSD endure which is most affecting. Gwyn rattles and writhes in a blur of rapid shaking and tumbling, clutching his addled head, while Albert contorts his body into positions I didn't think feasible, his silent screams and pained face accentuating the agony of the mind as he arches his back and falls to the ground. These dancers really feel the mental torture, and make the thoughts physical in both a brutal and beautiful way.

The dance ends with the soldiers walking slowly off-stage, staring out audience members as they go. I held Albert's accusing gaze for as long as I could, but the collective guilt we all feel for these men who give their lives willingly for Queen and country - that's you, all of us! - makes it hard to look them in the eye for too long. It's a powerful, passive-aggressive end to a highly physical performance, and leaves you debating your own morals at the end of almost three hours of thought-provoking, emotionally-exhausting live theatre.

The stats
Triptych I
Filming/ editor: Judith Roberts
Grade: Rodrigo Sanchez
Triptych II
Writers: Gwyneth Glyn, Judith Roberts
Director: Judith Roberts
Cast: Rhys Downing; Ioan Gwyn; Rebecca Harries; Catrin Morgan; Ceri Murphy; Rhys Parry Jones; Dan Rochford; Gareth ap Watkins
Triptych III
Choreographer: Gwyn Emberton
Performers: Gwyn Emberton, Albert Garcia
Performed at Galeri, Caernarfon, July 14th to 16th, 2015. Performance reviewed: July 14th, 2015

Links
Triptych on DeOscuro website (retrieved July 15 2015)
Triptych on Galeri website (retrieved July 15 2015)
Triptych trailer (retrieved July 15 2015)
Combat Stress - the Veterans' Mental Health Charity (retrieved July 15 2015)