he title is a riff on Dante’s Inferno but there aren’t enough circles in hell for the horror contained in Bill Cain’s upsetting play. The names have been changed but this is essentially a feverish re-examination of the life, trial and death of US soldier Steven Dale Green, who was convicted in 2009 for killing an Iraqi family and raping the 14-year-old daughter. It’s a really tough watch – not without merit but difficult to sit through and with some serious flaws in its composition. Favour review – a moving addiction drama with occasional lapses Read more There’s a heated intensity to Guy Masterson’s tightly calibrated production,held together by Jack Arnold’s humming battlecry of a soundscape which slowly engulfs us as the trial approaches. Duncan Henderson’s neatly symbolic set frames the action inside a pair of glowing red circles: from the fury of Baghdad to the loneliness of the holding cell, this is the story of a soldier’s life that has always, on some level, felt like a kind of imprisonment. Advertisement As the soldier, Daniel E Reeves, meets with attorneys and lawyers, a seriously creepy pastor and shockingly incompetent army psychiatrists (all played with an eerie sense of disassociation by Samara Neely-Cohen, Daniel Bowerbank and David Calvitto), we start to suspect they might all be a product of Reeves’s deeply disturbed psyche. This fuzzy hold on reality makes for a powerful atmosphere but a confusing play. Cain seems to be making an argument about the hypocrisy of war and the culpability of those in authority but it’s hard to know which bits to take seriously in a play that’s neither fact nor fiction. Joshua Collins is horribly watchable as the imprisoned Reeves. To simply spend time with this soldier is to begin to humanise him. There’s something about the physicality of Collins – who salutes and exercises with robotic precision – that points to how little control a recruit has over his own body. But for all Collins’ charisma, there’s something that doesn’t sit right about telling this story through the soldier’s eyes, and giving so little time to the murder victims. At the Park theatre, London, until 23 July. Then at Assembly George Square, Edinburgh fringe, 3–29 August.