It feels like an intrusion. Also a privilege and a witnessing. These accounts, gathered by Tiago Rodrigues for Comédie de Genève, usually go unheard. They are the experiences of the staff of the International Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders attempting to give humanitarian aid in war zones.
Like soldiers returning from battle unable to articulate the enormity of what they have gone through, they normally keep this stuff to themselves. Sharing it with friends and family would be too much of a downer or simply too bleak for anyone to comprehend, so they keep quiet.
But here they talk.
Four excellent actors – Adrien Barazzone, Beatriz Brás, Baptiste Coustenoble and Natacha Koutchoumov – lead us into the heart of darkness with unattributed verbatim-style accounts from field hospitals, jungles and mountain outposts. There are riots, bombardments and ambushes. Then blood transfusions, amputations and bullet extractions. Even the happier tales tend to end in death. They are, says one, “normal people trying to do the least harm possible”.
Rodrigues, who is artistic director of the Avignon festival, introduces the material as if it were unexceptional. The aid workers are variously surprised anyone would care about them, unconvinced there is anything to say and sceptical about the capacity of theatre to recreate what they have lived through. But as the emotive power of the stories takes hold, they are driven to fury, frustration and self-loathing, scarred by the apparent hopelessness of it all.
The “impossible” of the title refers to the no-go areas into which they must venture. “Possible” is the ordered world the rest of us inhabit. The rumble of Gabriel Ferrandini’s bass drum, digitally modified to send vibrations rippling through the fabric of the theatre, puts us physically on edge. His long percussion solos, performed within a shifting tented landscape of peaks and slopes, are as unforgiving as the testimonies.
You might ask about the stories we do not hear. The voices of those receiving aid remain silent. So, too, do those of the leaders who create the political context in which humanitarian disasters occur. What we do hear, devastatingly, overwhelmingly, infuriatingly, are the voices of people compelled to help, not always for pure motives, but at unfathomable personal cost.
• At Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 14 August
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