Leaving Vietnam review

Vergette’s script is insightful, if unevenly paced. It dwells on Jimmy’s wartime experiences which, while perfectly plausible, are also overfamiliar. Jimmy talks at length about his bond with his fellow marines, the bloody death of a close friend, and his growing desensitisation to the violence in which he’s involved. By contrast, the play’s shorter closing section – set during the 2016 Trump campaign – packs in a flurry of big revelations, new characters and even a road-trip subplot. The story accelerates here, as the people whose lives Jimmy has touched compel him to respond to contemporary developments rather than languishing in the past. When he starts wearing a red MAGA cap, his down-to-earth wife Bernice promptly leaves him. Later, he gets a timely visit from the son of his former squadmate, Mexican immigrant Alverado, who encourages him to visit the veterans’ memorial in Washington DC.

Though Jimmy’s journey away from bitterness and towards self-forgiveness feels abrupt, the character is on the whole nuanced and believably drawn. Vergette’s performance invests Jimmy with cantankerous charm and steadfast dignity, but there is always something menacing just beneath the surface, an inconsolable rage that we glimpse through his habitual use of racial slurs and the callous acts of violence he commits. Vergette grows increasingly animated, pacing and squirming in anxiety as Jimmy’s defence mechanism of emotional detachment begins to fail him.

There are no easy answers offered, but the piece convincingly articulates the justified anger of working-class people who feel locked out from the prosperity promised by unrestrained capitalism, looked down on by mainstream politicians, or betrayed by callous governments that squander their soldiers’ lives in short-sighted, unwinnable conflicts.