In the late 1960s Ted Hughes wrote a free poetic adaptation of George Schehadé’s Histoire de Vasco. Now Adam Barnard’s production stages the unearthed fragments of this long-lost text for the first time. The play follows the wanderings of peace-loving barber Vasco through a nightmarishly absurd warzone, pursued by a girl’s prophetic dreams of doomed heroism. In Hughes’ caustic tragicomedy, the point is not so much the awfulness of war, as the danger of falling for the old lies of martial glory.
Volleys of bantering repetition (that betray the text’s origins as an opera libretto) lend a note of overwrought comedy to proceedings, while a cast of eccentric characters straggle through a forest full of brooding poetic imagery. Skewed military necessity perverts the natural landscape into a ghastly parody of itself, where every tree hides a spy, each scarlet flower is a target, and war breeds screeching crows out of the carcasses of dead soldiers.
An unnecessarily ingenious set doesn’t exactly make the action skip along, but the division of the play into a series of tableaux suits the tale’s picaresque bittiness. An air of threadbare scenic illusion also sharpens the show’s satiric edge, and there’s a parade of dead dogs that plays a brilliant double-bluff upon the audience’s good-natured eagerness to suspend disbelief.
The company twinkles with ghoulish merriment throughout. Among a strong ensemble William Tapley as a black-uniformed messenger of ill-omen, and Michael Kirk’s mellifluous Mayor both make a good stab at stealing the show. Jonathan Broadbent, as baby-faced Vasco, exudes unthinking innocence, and a gentleness that verges upon self-satisfied indolence, in an unromantic portrait of all-too-corruptible naiveté. He doesn’t stand a chance against the unhinged certainty of Laura Rees’ visionary Marguerite, and between them this childishly hopeful pair of would-be lovers wreck their imaginary paradise.
Veering between silliness and savagery, at times The Story of Vasco feels like a mind-bending collision of Milligan and Lorca. Portents of doom mingle with running gags and daft slapstick amid a deranged carnage that blurs the line between logic and madness. War is the joker who gets everyone in the end, while a chorus of hungry crows scream their approval.
