Press

Western Daily Press
22 November 1999
By Sue Greenaway

A drama out of a crisis

In the second part of WARRIORS (BBC1), one of the characters said bitterly that he wouldn’t give this job to a dog. The job in question was being part of the UN peacekeeping force in Bosnia in 1992.

In the first part of the three-hour drama, the build-up was slow, establishing the background of the soldiers. It took some time before I started to care where they had come from and where they were going. Then I started to care very much about all of them and what they had to do. This was a tough one to dramatize, because we’ve all seen so much footage on the news bulletins over the years of the atrocities, the suffering, the cruelty and the inhumanity.

Warriors didn’t pull its punches but left the right amount to the imagination. I wept when they covered their faces and gagged at the choking smell of the dead. The performances were terrific. Matthew MacFadyen, Ioan Gruffudd and Damian Lewis, in particular, did justice to a difficult subject. Sometimes I think our edges get blurred when we are constantly bombarded with news. A well thought out drama can give us another take on reality.