Petrol Jesus Nightmare #5 (In the Time of the Messiah)

Proving that nightmares, as well as dreams, can come true, Henry Adam's frighteningly timely Petrol Jesus Nightmare #5 (In the Time of the Messiah) takes its audience into the heart of war in the Middle East.

Just as news reports about the current conflict tend to pose more questions than they answer, the play offers little in the way of clear-cut explanations or easy solutions. Instead, Adam joins the dots between politics, religion and money to create a plot that could play as a farce.

Two Israeli soldiers are holed up in an unspecified occupied territory: one has mislaid his mind somewhere between conscription and shooting kids; the other has lost control of his bowels. There's no reference to the cause of the war, and the enemy are referred to, ambiguously, as 'greaseballs'.

Into this naturalistic setting comes a disillusioned captain escorting two distinctly symbolic American characters: a bible-thumping Texan oil man and the widow of a controversial Rabbi recently gunned down in New York. Both are under the protection of the Israeli army, but the soldiers have a few questions they'd like answered.

The problem with the play's distinctly anti-American perspective is that we're offered little in the way of alternative solutions. A Stetson-wearing cowboy preaching about oil profits and the coming apocalypse is the perfect modern-day bogeyman - the other characters needn't even state their case in order to emerge morally superior.

The end of the play has the potential to turn the debate on its head, and ask who deserves more condemnation - he who funds killers to fuel his own religious fantasy, or he who pulls the trigger without any emotion, just to hear the sound of the 'rat-a-tat-tat'. But the odds are already stacked in favour of the humanised, traumatised soldiers, and as a result the kind of behaviour that would elsewhere be condemned as despicable appears worryingly justified.