The Unreturning

I want to return to my home. I want a hero’s welcome: fanfares and brass bands and sausage rolls and jaeger bombs. I want to lie under the skylight on my mum’s bed and watch clouds. I want to go out in my hometown, drink and dance and shout for no reason! I want to sing in the streets and puke in the gutter and they will never know. None of them will ever know what I….

Can beginnings be made out of endings? In a British Northern Coastal town, three young men are coming home. In 1918 George returns from the Western Front. In 2013 Frankie is back from his final tour of Afghanistan. And sometime in the not-too-distant future, Nat returns from an overseas refugee camp to what was his hometown.

A compelling new play by Anna Jordan (Yen – Royal Court Theatre, Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting 2013), directed by Neil Bettles (Associate Director of Frantic Assembly) and featuring Frantic’s celebrated physicality, The Unreturning explores the profound effect that war has on young lives, and asks – what does coming home really mean? What is home? And when experience has shattered you into a million pieces, will home help to put you together again, or treat you as an ugly truth it does not want to confront?

This production celebrates the 10th anniversary of Frantic Assembly’s Ignition training programme, of which Theatre Royal Stratford East has previously been a partner.