10 Soldiers

A couple of years ago, I visited the army reserve centre on the outskirts of Edinburgh during the Fringe.  Audaciously, the Rosie Kay Dance Company was portraying army life through the medium of dance for an audience of squaddies and punters. It was an intimate, visceral experience as five dancers, playing 5 Soldiers, performed in the round at this unorthodox, yet oddly fitting venue, to men that had experienced for real what was being abstracted onstage. When I first heard that Rosie Kay had scaled up the production, bringing no less than 10 Soldiers to the Theatre Royal, I eagerly anticipated the result.
 
Before that hunger was sated, however, the audience were treated to a brief, gently moving piece, from young dancers drawn from an amalgam of local groups. Fight or Flight examined the after-effects of war with a touching simplicity that nonetheless belied its apparently brief rehearsal time. Serious faced dancers flexed their bodies to the rhythms of Max Richters’s music, while veteran Andy Price’s challenging interview played over the top, in a routine that Xenoula Elefttheides had developed to best exploit the range of abilities to hand. Only the hardest of hearts would have failed to enjoy the looks of great achievement writ large on the dancers’ proud faces.
 
Rosie Kay describes 10 Soldiers as a prequel to her earlier production, and as such it surely legitimate to judge one against the other. An audience coming to this production without preconceptions might well have gained more from it than I , but by comparison, I found it a lesser work in almost every respect. We started, as did the soldiers, with basic training and there was energy and movement in their preparations. We see them changing clothes, exercising, and generally larking about. Certain dancers began to stand out and there was certainly an attempt to create individual characters, notwithstanding a bigger, and more diverse, cast. However, Kay seemed to struggle finding something for everyone to do and here lies a key difficulty with the production. Whereas she appeared content in the previous show to rely on dance as an abstract metaphor, here she looked to be developing a more concrete narrative. The problem is that the narrative was neither coherent nor compelling enough to justify the connective tissue required. For much of this early section, dancers were required to bark order, pratfall and run around in circles. Perhaps Kay is being clever here. Perhaps she’s saying that preparation for conflict is all about tedious repetition and hanging about. Perhaps she intended the audience to feel impatient waiting for the show to get going. If so, it was a brave stance, and as a piece of theatre certainly tested me.
 
After an interval that felt unearned, we moved much closer to the territory she had explored in her earlier work, with vignettes of army life undercutting our preconceptions of what soldiers get up to. Synchronised nose picking, Male-bonding punch-ups and general tomfoolery were effectively done, but it was telling that some of the more striking passages were lifted from the earlier work, betraying an absence of new thinking. Most notably, Harriet Ellis reprised her role as the object of male desire. I recall a (genuine) army captain taking great exception to what amounts to an accusation of misogyny in the army, while debating with Rosie Kay after the previous show. Kay’s justification – “I just know it goes on” – seemed unsatisfactorily hazy at the time, so it was interesting to see how the emphasis shifted. The female soldier now appeared complicit in attracting attention, an ambiguous and controversial proposition, but one that did at least afford her the opportunity to show off her considerable dancing skills.
 
A rebuttal of Emma Houston’s advances was then followed by a tyre hurling romance, of sorts, with Luke Bradshaw, another dancer who distinguished himself in a crowded field Bradshaw, but by now my patience was wearing thin. Neither an inventive reworking of the first production, or something genuinely new and exciting, the show thereafter staggered to a close, in a series of episodic series of vignettes that recalled being done previously with greater simplicity and clarity. There was some nifty upscaling with back projection and special effects, but this was no substitute for the vicarious exhaustion of a sweaty, out of breath dancer falling at your feet. By the time the wounded were walking on their knees, what previously been a heart breaking metaphor for disability, now felt like a tired, recycled idea.
 
This production left me wondering at my appraisal of the earlier work. Was I caught up in an Edinburgh bubble, peer-pressured into admiring a well-regarded work that tricked me, through its unorthodox venue and subject-matter, into thinking it was better than it was? These 10 Soldiers had certainly, for me, lessened the impact of all fifteen, and that was a great pity when the earlier piece had had such an impact. Perhaps the answer to this question lies buried in Kay’s programme notes, where she acknowledges that the world of soldiering has moved on and that yet for this production she returned to her original research.  In other words, there was nothing new or insightful about this incarnation – just a reshaping of what was once an original idea, adding to which was an awful lot of running around, and subtracted from which was immediacy and the shock of the new.