Suicide or what? Interestingly – and I think entirely correctly – the ‘or what?’ question is never addressed in Philip Ralph’s powerful 75-minute play about the puzzling deaths from gunshot wounds between 1995 and 2002 of four young soldiers at the Deepcut Barracks in Surrey.
While Ralph supplies strong evidence to challenge the official version that all four killed themselves, he makes no suggestions for an alternative scenario. A sadistic superior? The goading by colleagues, perhaps as part of a culture of self-destruction of the sort said recently to have gripped Bridgend in South Wales? A serial killer on the prowl?
Ralph resists speculation of this sort because Deep Cut is emphatically a play about hard facts. Every line spoken by the six-strong cast has been spoken by one of the real-life characters they play or taken from official documents or Press reports. There is no place here for guesswork.
The drama focuses on the second of the four dead soldiers, the only young woman, 18-year-old Private Cheryl James from Llangollen, who was found dead from a single bullet wound between the eyes on November 27, 1995.
She never appears but comes over as a warm, fun-loving teenager through the memories of Army mate ‘Jonesy’ (Amy Morgan) and her grieving parents (Pip Donaghy and Janice Cramer) in whose ornament-cluttered home the action is set.
For ‘fun-loving’, of course, read promiscuous, and we learn she had two lovers in the hours immediately before her death. But this was par for the course, one assumes, at a camp where, according to sympathetic journalist Brian Cathcart (Derek Hutchinson) “sexual activity was rampant”, 800 used condoms having been collected in the clean-up preceding an open day.
But this tends to suggest Cheryl’s lust for life rather than a propensity towards suicide as concluded in the unsatisfactory ‘inquiry’ conducted by Nicholas Blake QC (Simon Molloy).
More likely she would have preferred to Live Forever – to quote the Oasis song director Mick Gordon pointedly (and too noisily) uses to punctuate the action – than die before she was out of her teens.
Deep Cut continues until Saturday. 01865 305305.
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