Josh’s Monsters – Pulse Fringe Festival

In the Second World War, loved ones waited nervously at home, waiting weeks, months, or even years for news of their soldier’s fate while fighting overseas. Now in the digital age news reaches those families almost instantaneously.

Email, text, Skype, blogs and mobile phones bridge the gap to home but is such immediate contact always a good thing?

In Josh’s Monsters, Multi Story Theatre Company examines the impact of the information age on those left at home while their loved ones are in Afghanistan.

Doug and Chrissie have a strange relationship. He’s a web designer and technology geek who spends most of his time in the cellar. She takes solace in the kitchen baking cakes. They communicate via Skype and web chat. Their son, Josh, is about to leave for his second tour of duty in Helmand, a cake is baking in the oven for him to take with him, and the taxi is booked.

Doug and Chrissie have some issues to get through first. Doug, a die-hard pacifist still can’t quite come to terms with his step-son’s military career. Chrissie has panic attacks as she revisits her son’s close call with death in an explosion that tore apart his best friend. Can Chrissie tempt Doug away from his laptop to bid Josh farewell and can both come to terms with Josh’s motives for wanting to fight?

Initially based on over 20 hours worth of recorded testimony of real soldiers and families, writers and actors Bill Buffery and Gill Nathanson have crafted a multi-layered work that looks not only at the impact of war but the wider conflicts that threaten to pull many families apart.

There is a disconcerting sense of domesticity as the audience enter. Seated at onstage tables, audiences are greeted by Chrissie who offers them cake. There’s a feeling of a coffee morning as she proudly displays her baking skills. She continues to bake throughout the show, as Doug on the opposite side of the stage plays with his technology and gadgets. As they communicate online, Doug brings up various documents and websites, projected onto two screens. Audiences therefore watch a mix of live action and projected images; in fact, there is a show within a show, watching fellow audiences to see which they choose to watch, actor or screen.

There’s a subtlety to the script that lulls you into a false sense of comfort, despite the domesticity there’s a much darker plot at work here. Violence, repression, grief – all combining into a detailed and moving family drama, a mix as satisfying as the cakes on offer.