Theatre can sometimes jolt the memory. At a time when Ukraine has fallen off the media radar, this play by Natal’ya Vorozhbit, translated by Sasha Dugdale, provides a powerful reminder of the bitterness of the war that led to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. In particular, it makes the point that women attracted by the dubious glamour of the military can also become casualties of the conflict.

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The play consists of six vignettes of violence. The first is far and away the best. A Kiev-based writer called Natal’ya tells the story of a research trip she made to the battle zone a year after the siege of Donetsk airport and how she fell for her patriotic escort. It is good precisely because it is personal, moving and filled with a double guilt: that of the confidence-revealing storyteller and of a woman who found love in a region where men were blowing each other to bits with rocket launchers. Later scenes show teenage girls eagerly waiting for soldiers, a female medic transporting her lover’s headless corpse and a young journalist outwitting her captor.

Vorozhbit overdoes the point that the soldiers, for all their supposed heroism in the fight against separatists, either prove useless in the sack or reliant on oral satisfaction. I’d have liked to hear more about the complex politics behind the pitched battles.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Engaging … Kate Dickie in Bad Roads. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

But Vorozhbit, a beneficiary of the Royal Court’s international residency in 2005, captures the collateral damage suffered by women, and suggests that not all of Ukraine’s troubles can be pinned on the conflict. The final scene, which takes place prewar, shows a pair of farmers ruthlessly fleecing a luckless female traveller. The play’s title also has a double meaning. It is a metaphor for the rocky emotional paths taken by women in wartime and a reminder of the pitted surfaces that have disfigured the Ukrainian countryside since the communist era.

Camilla Clarke’s design turns the Theatre Upstairs into a pine forest and Vicky Featherstone’s production is sharply acted. In the opening, confessional monologue Kate Dickie shows a capacity to engage with everyone in the audience. There is also impressive work by Ria Zmitrowicz as the captive journalist and Tadhg Murphy as her traumatised tormentor. Even if there is nothing startlingly original about the idea that war turns men into animals, in her relentless focus on conflict’s female victims, Vorozhbit shows herself to be a Ukrainian Sarah Kane.



• At the Royal Court, London, until 23 December. Box office: 020-7565 5000.