Hayley Squires

The boy who comes back from a war far away in a wooden box is glorified and called a hero. As the funeral plans are made in a small Kent town, his siblings squabble over who he was. Maybe the fanfare isn't needed for this heroic martyr.

Vera Vera Vera is a blackly comic play about what we are willing to fight for. Her first work for the theatre, Hayley Squires is a bracing new voice, clear eyed and loud, looking at violence, neglect and apathy. Depicting a gritty slice of social realism, Vera Vera Vera portrays the disjunction between the lives of the surviving family against the memories and patriotic commemoration for the dead. Looking at drug addiction, crime, verbal and domestic abuse, engrained racism, the characters' downtrodden and trapped lives are exposed with honesty and verve.

This brave and uncompromising play questions both the validity of the myth of the martyred soldier and the true worth of survival for those left behind.