Charlie Ward review – Chaplin's slapstick turns into shellshock

York Army Museum
Lying in a row of beds, an audience of 10 is transported to a wartime hospital in Sound&Fury’s arresting show

There are no images of the first world war in Sound&Fury’s commemorative installation. So acquainted are we with the iconography of trenches, mud and barbed wire that the absence is more powerful than any number of poppies or corpses. Unseen, the horrors of conflict become all the more haunting.

Charlie Ward attempts instead to enter a shell-shocked imagination. Lying in a row of beds, an audience of 10 is transported to a wartime hospital, surrounded by its busy hum of noises. Dan Jones’s intimate sound design takes us into the mind of Harry, a wounded soldier drifting in and out of consciousness, moving between memory and trauma. In one moment, his mother’s voice is whispering tenderly in our ears; in another, the room vibrates with the impact of an exploding shell.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Qg08tF