The Nights is a brilliantly executed piece of theatre by three times Fringe First Award winning playwright Henry Naylor. Set in Britain in the wake of 9/11 and the invasions of Iraq and Syria it deals with how our lives have been transformed by those events. It exposes the moral ambiguities that arise when we claim to be promoting western values and at the same time we seem to be eroding those very values in the name of the war on terror.
Jane Carter, played by Aiofe Lennon, is an Islamophobic tabloid journalist who usually writes celebrity gossip columns. She is given the assignment of writing a damning piece about a teenage jihadi bride who is trying to return home to Britain. In her search for contacts who can give her an angle for her story she meets an antique dealing military veteran who has been tried, and cleared, of war crimes. Captain Kane, played by Nicholas Boulton, initially rejects her request but contact between them continues, with huge consequences for both of them.
Through the delivery of alternating monologues and also conversations between the two protagonists we are taken into the dark places of their personal histories, witness their nightmares and meet the ghosts who haunt them. We watch them struggle with the contradictions and challenges they face, how each of them deals with their desire for vengeance.
The Nights is the fifth stand-alone play in Naylor’s Arabian Nightmares Series and is showing at the Arch, Holden Street Theatres until March 15th.
Rated M for ages 15 and over. It contains confronting and distressing themes and coarse language.
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