It takes a little while to settle into No Man’s Land, the new play from writer Rachel Trezise and director Matthew Holmquist. This almost one-man show starring Kyle Stead is deliberately disorientating, set in a kind of hinterland of the subconscious, an abyss littered with nostalgic debris.
Stead plays Lewis, a young man whose trauma has resulted in his arrested development. He slips and slides between his memories at dizzying speed – a familiar theatrical device that cleverly sidesteps the need for elaborate scene changes – but it does mean for the first few minutes you have to continually adjust your frequency to a station that keeps losing signal. This establishes an uneven rhythm which, at first, demands a degree of patience from the audience.
Lewis, or “Lew” as most call him, spends his days working in his mother’s pub, mocked by regulars and reminded at every turn that he isn’t doing anything of worth with his life. His friend Josh (voiced delicately by Tobias Weatherburn) has escaped their small-town confines and doesn’t let him forget it. Barflies – Ronnie (Richard Elfyn) a loud ex-soldier and Mervyn (Rhys Parry Jones) a wistful former miner — urge Lewis toward some notion of masculine purpose, ideally, forged in a form of hardship or labour. To them, his lack of perceivable struggle in life represents a failure of character. But as the play soon reveals, Lewis bears scars that can’t be seen.
Kyle Stead as Lewis. Image by Kirsten McTernan
Kyle Stead’s performance is nothing short of extraordinary. It’s one of the finest pieces of acting I’ve seen all year. His physicality is astonishing. Each jolt, fall and contorted movement carries the weight of invisible pain. It’s hard to put into words just how striking his acting is – it borders on athletic. He truly embodies this character.
The supporting cast, though heard only through recorded voices, still make a profound impact. Weatherburn does some nice subtle voice work that later becomes surprisingly haunting. Elfyn’s rage is palpable and at times, genuinely terrifying, whereas Parry Jones grounds his archetypal character with authentic charm.
Tori Lyons stands out as Lewis’s mother, particularly during her conflicted response to Lewis’s revelation. Her journey from anger to denial, to outright devastation felt strikingly realistic. Toby Hawkins too, as a younger Lewis, offers up a sweet, energetic performance that makes Stead’s later turmoil all the more impactful.
Holmquist is at home with the ‘netherworld’ space the play inhabits, building on his tremendous work on Splinter that he directed with Nerida Bradley at the Sherman in 2024. He’s clearly a director who thrives in that undefined space between worlds. The physical theatre sequences are also tightly choreographed, creating a tangible sense of unease.
Bethan Thomas’s design, Cara Hood’s lighting and sound from David McSparron and Gareth Swindail-Parry contribute to an atmosphere that feels both otherworldly and intimate – I found it reminiscent of Stranger Things’ realm of the Upside Down or the neon-infused paranoia you might find in a John Carpenter film.
Yes, Trezise’s script does take a bit of time to find its footing, with early scenes perhaps a little too fragmented to be fully comprehensible, but the purposeful messy structure does eventually find form. And once it does, Trezise’s writing becomes powerful and incisive, weaving together threads of trauma – military, industrial and maternal – and ensuring each is given its due weight. What then emerges is a deeply human exploration of PTSD, a reminder that some wounds leave no physical mark.
No Man’s Land may start uncertainly, but it soon becomes something quite unforgettable. The end result is a beautifully constructed meditation on trauma and a touching examination of what it takes to move forward in spite of it.
