The Wheel

The NTS, now in its fifth year, has a habit of bringing future classics to the Fringe with Black Watch and Beautiful Burnout under its belt. Zinnie Harris’ new play, The Wheel, does not deviate from this pattern. The play begins with Beatriz preparing for the wedding of her sister, when war breaks out and disrupts their plans as their farm is occupied by the army. As the senior officers exile a farmer for his dealings with the enemy, Beatriz is left to help his forgotten daughter locate her father.

The play is really a quest of a woman and child travelling through conflict, their goal irrelevant but to keep them going. As they travel through a landscape, not of battle, but of the devastated villages left behind, the suffering of the civilian is examined, damaged not by the enemy alone, but by their own protectors too. The whole cast seem to exude desperation as the civilians cling on the broken pieces of their past lives and the soldiers grab at any form of control; over their own death, of prisoners, of homes. Beatriz herself, played by Catherine Walsh, holds on to her strength and spirit for as long as possible and initially tries to preserve the children from the experiences of war but this proves impossible, resorting to obsessively keeping the girl’s outward appearance clean in place of her innocence.

The set and lighting design are nothing less than magical; hands disguised as butterflies lit from above danced a staccato step around the actors, and a bird on a stick raised up into a beam of light at different heights became an eerie flight. There was no need to disguise the presence of an actor behind those hands, if anything it added to the effect as soon as those hands began to move. The Wheel is a poignant drama beautifully presented, that explores the suffering and corruption of the innocent individual and asks if conflict ever really changes in its disregard of the civilian.