Owen Sheers’ Pink Mist at the West Yorkshire Play House

This week, Tom and Ashley visited the West Yorkshire Play House to watch Owen Sheers’ Pink Mist. A tale of three young men who join the British army in the hope of bettering themselves and the future for their families. The play takes the audience on an emotional journey charting the lives of these three characters and the women they leave behind, from basic training in Catterick to their service in Afghanistan.

Pink Mist uncovers and tackles the stigma’s and often misunderstood territories of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and physical injury’s in returning and active serving armed forces personal. Sheer’s interviews with over thirty ex-service men is testament to the emotional investment, in the characters that audiences engage with. Pink Mist deconstructs these characters, seeing past their physical and mental wounds, to expose the human beings within. And that’s what makes Pink Mist such an invested piece of theatre; the characters are those to whom the audience can relate, they are real people, with real lives and family’s that have been effected by War.

For us as theatre makers, Pink Mist gave the company a lot to think about in terms of our own personal investment in ‘Project Sword’. When creating our own performance, it is vital that don’t recreate the landings that happened that day. Pink Mist encouraged us to think about the development of our characters, creating true to live people, to whom are audience can connect with. We don’t want to recreate the war on stage, but to tell the stories and the events that happened on that day June the 6th.

-Ash