Ruined, Almeida Theatre

Telling the truth about women in a war zone usually hits hardest through one of two means: clear reportage that presents the facts, or the devastating narrative of a survivor. Making a drama out of atrocity gets harder, though it's an age-old tradition, which is maybe why directors usually prefer to draw parallels through updating Euripides or Shakespeare. Lynn Nottage's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, fired by interviews with women in the Democratic Republic of Congo and premiered last year in New York, has two powerful assets which make it well worth seeing. It tries to show us how an attempt at normal life, and a living, can be made out of chaos, and it offers an optimistic epilogue which is hard-won but affecting, without affectation - as it has to be.

Telling the truth about women in a war zone usually hits hardest through one of two means: clear reportage that presents the facts, or the devastating narrative of a survivor. Making a drama out of atrocity gets harder, though it's an age-old tradition, which is maybe why directors usually prefer to draw parallels through updating Euripides or Shakespeare. Lynn Nottage's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, fired by interviews with women in the Democratic Republic of Congo and premiered last year in New York, has two powerful assets which make it well worth seeing. It tries to show us how an attempt at normal life, and a living, can be made out of chaos, and it offers an optimistic epilogue which is hard-won but affecting, without affectation - as it has to be.