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If you missed Shellshocked in South Australia or off-Broadway, there's no need to panic.
This month, the internationally travelled postwar thriller can be found at Queen’s Mill in Castleford and St John’s Parish Hall in Staincross.
For its Leeds-based writer Philip Stokes, that journey - from an idea formed at home to audiences on opposite sides of the world, then back into community venues in Yorkshire - says something important about where theatre belongs.
“I love the fact that Shellshocked is on in these two local venues,” he says.
“If you didn’t catch it in Australia, don’t worry: you can watch it in a Castleford mill, and that means a lot.”
It also brings one of the production’s performers home. Lee Bainbridge, who plays the artist Mr Lupine, is from Castleford. After taking the role around the world, he'll now perform it close to where his own story began.
That return is being made possible by Red Ladder Local, the inspiring programme that takes professional productions beyond conventional theatres and into community centres, churches, mills, pubs and village halls.
The surroundings might be familiar and the tickets deliberately affordable, but the theatre itself isn't reduced or simplified.
Shellshocked arrives carrying darkness, danger and a question that has troubled artists for centuries: must somebody experience suffering to represent it truthfully - and what happens when the hunger to create great art becomes an excuse for exploitation?
Set in the aftermath of the Second World War, the two-person thriller follows Wesley Hepton, a young soldier returning home traumatised by what he has experienced.
His mother, hoping he might help support the family, submits his portfolio to the established painter Mr Lupine. Wesley is invited to interview for a position as his apprentice.
It appears to offer a route into another life. But inside the artist’s studio, Wesley encounters a different kind of madness.
The relationship between the two men becomes a tense game of control. Lupine’s interest in the young soldier and his experiences isn't necessarily what it first appeared to be, while the respectable manners of the period conceal an increasingly violent struggle.
Stokes describes the resulting play as an intense, twist-filled, cat-and-mouse thriller.
“It’s about mental health and oppression,” he says, “but more than that, I hope it’s just rollickingly good entertainment.”
Shellshocked may explore trauma, repression, loyalty and the moral limits of artistic ambition, but Stokes has little interest in asking an audience to swallow theatre as though it were educational medicine. He wants them to feel something.
Before Stokes became an internationally produced playwright, he spent the 1990s in a Leeds indie band called Jack Planet.
They were the house band at the Duchess of York, the legendary Vicar Lane music venue which hosted generations of musicians before closing in 2000. Jack Planet shared bills with bands including Pulp and Shed Seven.
“You can’t keep that lifestyle up forever,” Stokes concedes. But when he moved from music into theatre, he carried some of its instincts with him.
His attraction to playwriting began partly in disappointment. Too much of the theatre he encountered felt concerned with instruction rather than excitement. Coming from what he calls a “rock ’n’ roll background”, he began wondering whether a play could create the same energy as a gig.
Could theatre feel dangerous, immediate and alive?
“My early work certainly had a kind of punk element to it, a DIY feel,” he says. “Over the past 20 years I’ve had various degrees of success and found my own voice.”
Since writing and directing his first production in 2006, Stokes’s plays have been staged in London, New York, Chicago, Dublin, Adelaide and Edinburgh. His work has received awards from Fringe Review and the Adelaide Critics Circle, while his plays include Heroin(e) for Breakfast, Brighton ’84 and LASH.
But that rock ’n’ roll impulse has remained.
“It’s always about the audience for me,” he explains. “I’ve done shows which critically haven’t done so well, but people have said, ‘That’s the best show I’ve seen at this festival.’
“I want people to have conversations about it, whether they’re annoyed by it, amused by it or baffled by it. I want some kind of visceral reaction.”
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Shellshocked was Stokes’s first attempt to place one of his stories inside a historical period.
The initial inspiration came through conversations with his father about his grandfather’s experiences during the Second World War.
Moving the action away from the present allowed Stokes to explore contemporary questions through the social expectations of another age.
Young men returned from war having witnessed terrible violence and were expected to resume ordinary life. Psychological trauma had to coexist with a culture of deference, emotional restraint and respect for authority.
Wesley has survived the war, but he enters Lupine’s studio as a young man still expected to observe the manners of the time. Age, position and professional status favour the older artist.
“This allowed me to tap into this idea of a repressed individual,” says Stokes.
“Soldiers would come back from war and were just thrown back into everyday life, having seen the most horrific things. I think that’s still very contemporary when you look at soldiers returning home from war zones today.
“The ending is very violent, but it comes out of the manners of the time.”
The play’s central artistic question sharpens that conflict.
Does somebody need to have lived through an experience before they can create meaningful art about it? Can imagination alone reach the same truth? And when an artist draws upon another person’s suffering, where does creation end and extraction begin?
We know these aren't questions confined to the 1940s. They sit inside contemporary debates about authorship, ownership and whose stories artists are entitled to tell.
Shellshocked simply locks them in a room with two men, a blank canvas and a growing sense that something terrible is about to happen.
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Stokes understands why many people - particularly younger people - don't regard a trip to the theatre as part of their lives.
He didn't grow up watching plays himself. Music was his route into live performance, and he remains suspicious of theatre which appears more interested in improving an audience than entertaining it.
“A lot of young people don’t go to the theatre, and I understand why,” he says. “I don’t think young adults would put going to the theatre in their top five things to do.”
His response has been to make work capable of drawing a visceral reaction - and to take it to places where people might be more comfortable encountering it.
That ambition aligns naturally with Red Ladder.
The Leeds company has spent more than half a century challenging assumptions about who theatre is for. Since 2015, Red Ladder Local has taken professional productions into familiar neighbourhood spaces, removing some of the cost, travel and cultural barriers surrounding conventional venues.
The company says 53.1% of its Local audiences identify as working class, while almost two-thirds travel fewer than five miles to attend. Productions arrive with their professional cast, lighting, sound and video intact; the difference is that audiences can watch them in a church hall or community centre, often with a cup of tea and without worrying about the last bus home.
“Our Red Ladder Local programme is all about making great theatre both affordable and accessible to as wide an audience as possible,” says programmer Alice Barber.
Stokes’s LASH proved a hit with Red Ladder audiences two years ago. Bringing Shellshocked to Castleford and Staincross continues a relationship grounded in a shared belief: complex theatre doesn't need to be confined to metropolitan stages or traditional cultural buildings.
The play was conceived in a house in Leeds. A year later, Stokes watched it performed in Australia; 18 months after that, it reached New York.
Now it's returning to Yorkshire.
There's something perfectly Red Ladder about the whole journey. International acclaim is welcome. Awards are lovely. Standing ovations thousands of miles from home provide an extraordinary thrill.
But great theatre should also be able to walk into a Castleford mill, set up its lights and frighten the life out of everybody five miles down the road.
Shellshocked
Shellshocked is produced by Richard Jordan Productions and 412 with Lawrence Batley Theatre and Harrogate Theatre, in association with Pleasance.
Header image: Craig Lomas
