What makes it particularly difficult to judge a play like Philip Ralph’s Deep Cut is the visceral, outraged reaction elicited by its subject. This work won the 2008 Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award, and the amount of indignation it generates in its audience is similar to that produced by movies like Jim Sheridan’s In The Name of the Father - only this time there is no ‘happy’ ending, yet.

Deep Cut focuses particularly on the family and friends of one of the four soldiers who died of gunshots at Deepcut Barracks between 1995 and 2002, 18-year-old Private Cheryl James, and it uses direct testimonies and original journalistic and enquiry materials to expose Cheryl’s story and that of her parents, parallel to the media and government reaction (or lack thereof) to the events. Cheryl’s death, like that of Private Sean Benton before her and those of Private Geoff Gray and Private James Collinson after her, was dismissed by the Army as suicide; in spite of the worrying coincidence of two similar deaths in the same training barracks in a short amount of time, and in spite of there being no evidence that either Sean or Cheryl had any suicidal tendencies, an investigation from Surrey Police did not result in any prosecution.

For a while, Cheryl’s parents tried to protest and break the wall of silence imposed by the Army, but it was only in 2002 that a scandal emerged, thanks to the researchers of the BBC programme Frontline Scotland. The Surrey Police, admitting there had been some deficiencies during the original investigation (among other incredibly and outrageously shambolic things, the bullet that killed Cheryl had gone missing) opened a re-investigation, the conclusions of which, completed in 2004, were unexplainably withheld from the general public. Following pressure from the bereaved families and the media, in December 2004 the Deepcut Review was created, a 15-months private enquiry, entirely conducted behind closed doors, directed by Nicholas Blake QC.

Crucially, at this point, the parents decided to take part in the review, but independent forensics expert Frank Swann, who had concluded that none of the deaths was likely to be self-inflicted, refused, arguing that the review was bound to be biased, and that he would only agree to contribute to a public enquiry. It is hard to decide which choice was the better, whether Swann’s, which resulted in Blake being freer to draw his conclusions, but prevented the forensics data from being manipulated, or that of the parents, which allowed them to have their say, but only in an internally controlled and artificial framework. The play also argues strongly, through the words of journalist Brian Cathcart, a character in the play, that ‘journalism dropped the ball’ by not challenging the review enough, and allowing it to become the official version on the events.

Apart from Cathcart, the play represents Nicholas Blake, Frank Swann, Des and Doreen James - Cheryl’s parents - and one of her friends at Deepcut. Most of their dialogue is taken verbatim from actual documents or testimony, and addressed directly to the audience; this makes their words feel like an objective series of indisputable observations, rather than as a subjective or passionate take on the events. This is particularly true of Cheryl’s parents’ speeches - Cathcart and Swann, for all we know, might be strongly biased against the Army, but Des and Doreen, admittedly, were absolutely not so. In fact, they thought their daughter was making a good choice, that she would be ‘safe’ (the choice of this word is particularly heartbreaking) during her training, safer than she would have been roaming the streets with her friends at home. They didn’t think much of it when Sean died, accepted the suicide version without a blink, and, in the beginning, genuinely trusted the Army to provide them with an honest answer about what happened to their daughter. Thus the rage was all the greater. 

The decision to have the characters speak to us from the James’ living room, and later to use that same room to demonstrate how blood would spray out of a gunshot wound, is extremely effective in eliciting not only our sympathy, but also our indignation. If it is the case that the directing and writing decisions here come from the need to communicate things clearly and arouse the audience’s outrage, than they were well thought-out choices. But it also needs to be said that if we were to consider the play from a more strictly formal, aesthetic point of view, it would probably have received fewer stars than most critics gave it, as it is built more like a television documentary than as a theatrical work. As it is, the strength of the message and its emotional consequences make us somehow forget that, for example, the space of the stage is not used very well, and that many characters barely move as they speak.

The most touching part of the evening, and perhaps the one on which we do not reflect enough as we stomp out of the theatre shaking our heads and resolving to write to our MPs, is the last thing that Des James tells us: he does not want people to be on his side because they believe he was treated badly; he wants people to be on his side ‘because they believe me, and believe, as I do, that we cannot treat each other this way’.

Till 4 April 2009